Insomnia linked to brain changes

Put away your phones! Turn off Netflix! Light a candle and find a Griot to tell you a story! And then get to bed!

You know you want that sleep, so really, turn off that TV. (I am not going to practice what I preach though... luckily I can wake when I want to, or when the cat jumps on me for food.)

About 5 percent of the population suffers from insomnia, and new research indicates chronic sleeplessness may be damaging their brains. Using an advanced MRI technique, researchers in China compared the brains of 23 patients with insomnia with the brains of 30 people with normal sleep habits. Those with insomnia had significantly less white matter, the communication system that relays neural signals to different parts of the brain, MedicalDaily​.com reports. “If white matter tracts are impaired, communication between brain regions is disrupted,” says study author Shumei Li. Among the affected areas are the thalamus, which regulates sleep and alertness, and the limbic system, which is involved in learning, memory, and emotion. At this early stage, researchers caution, it’s not clear whether degraded white matter is a cause of insomnia—or a result.

And yet another tidbit taken from the April 22 edition of the Week Magazine.

Did humans kill off the hobbits?

Honestly, I need more information on how scientists figure this stuff out. I am taking a MOOC through Coursera on the subject of 3-D printing to learn the basics of that technology, maybe I should search for an anthropology free course... Anyway, they still need proof for this 'hunch.'

It's funny to think about evolution, isn't it? I mean I guess I always sorta had it in my head that we were the end result of evolution, not just a point on a never ending chain. And to think about all the iterations of life on this planet... why would we think that humans are the pinnacle? I think Stephen Hawkings recently publicly voiced that we really should be looking for ways to protect ourselves from another meteor crash a la Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck's silly movie whose name I can't think of at the moment. I found reference to Hawkings' pronouncement here, though I have no idea about the credibility of the website.

I guess this theory also supports the additonal data that humans have been wiping out species left and right for millions of years. Too bad our detectives are finding the clues to the crimes; we can't get away with it forever.

Evolutionary researchers are fascinated by Homo floresiensis, a mysterious species of 3-foot-tall human ancestors unearthed a dozen years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. At first, fossil remains seemed to suggest these creatures—nicknamed hobbits, after the diminutive characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels—lived as recently as 18,000 years ago. But new excavations indicate they roamed the island much earlier than previously thought—perhaps between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. The discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that hobbits outlived Neanderthals, which became extinct at least 28,000 years ago, and that they co-existed with Homo sapiens for tens of thousands of years. In fact, Homo floresiensis did not survive long once modern humans arrived in the region, suggesting that they may have been driven to extinction. “We were likely the decisive factor in their demise,” researcher Bert Roberts of Australia’s University of Wollongong tells Reuters.com. “But we still need to find hard evidence to back up this hunch.”

Taken from the April 22 edition of the Week Magazine.

1919 May Report

And here we are... Gone from France and finding our way back to American soil. Herb and his section leave France on May 7th and arrive in the US on the 19th, having sailed on the USS Rhode Island. You can read about the USS Rhode Island here. I took the following photograph from that wikipedia site.



It is fun to see Herb's handwriting on this final report... back to handwritten forms, no longer typed.

A global obesity epidemic

WTF? I am so disappointed in us. This is all since 1975? And we are shipping it abroad? No wonder everyone hates Americans. (I don't really mean that... well, maybe I do, but I am sure it's not our food that the rest of the world objects to... wait, or is it? Diplomacy by keeping our plastic food to ourselves?) Why have we not definitively agreed on the cause? I suppose the entire global economic system might implode if we did what was right for our health - like Michael Pollan said: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." If we didn't eat the crap manufactured by the likes of General Mills and Kraft all the employees would be jobless... Check out this previous Blog Post for discussions about manufactured food and the American military. Can you imagine if we fell back to being an agrarian society? Crap, seems like a lot of news stories are about the younger generations doing just that... with their smart phones in their back pockets.

So, looking for the correct wording of Michael Pollan's quote I found this other quote. Perfect for this blog: "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Those are words to live by! Ok, Nellie Jane Kirkpatrick, I look to you from now on! (I probably should have been for a long time now.... I wish I had learned some things from her.)

Again, taken from the April 22 edition of The Week Magazine:

Obesity now affects more human beings on this planet than hunger. New research reveals that as wealth and abundant food spread throughout the world, chronic overeating has reached epidemic proportions, putting millions of people at risk for heart attack, stroke, cancer, and other life-­threatening ailments. Based on studies encompassing 186 countries, researchers found that the number of obese men has tripled since 1975, while the number of obese women has doubled. Just 2.6 percent of the world’s population was classified as obese 40 years ago, but by 2014 that figure had climbed to 8.9 percent, roughly 640 million people. “We have changed from a world in which underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity to one in which more people are obese than underweight,” says study author Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London. The crisis has struck almost every corner of the planet, most severely in affluent, English-speaking countries, such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the U.K. If the trend continues, about one-fifth of the world’s adults will be obese by 2025, The Guardian (U.K.) reports, a particular threat to low-income nations ill-equipped to manage obesity-related disease. The epidemic is too widespread to combat only with medications or “a few extra bike lanes,” Ezzati says. “We need coordinated global initiatives, such as looking at the price of healthy food compared [with that of] unhealthy food, or taxing high-sugar and highly processed foods.”

I know it is not a popular position, but I agree we should tax high-sugar and highly processed "food". (Though I believe in the US we do not tax actual food, just the rest of the stuff in the grocery store, like tampons, but that is another discussion and probably not for here.)

It Must Be True... I Read It In The Tabloids

I think about my blog all the time, why I can't get here to write, I don't know. I am here today, though to share with you a tidbit from The Week Magazine.

This was taken from a recent edition of the publication, April 22. Please look for it here.

Identical twin sisters from China and their identical twin husbands plan to undergo plastic surgery because they can’t tell who is married to whom. The mix-ups began as soon as Yun Fei and Yun Yang got hitched to brothers Zhao Xin and Zhao Xua in a joint ceremony, with one brother finding himself holding hands with his sister-in-law during a romantic after-dinner stroll. The confusion got so bad on their joint honeymoon that the couples decided to get plastic surgery. Surgeons have agreed to subtly alter the quartet’s noses and foreheads, making each twin more identifiable.

Why plastic surgery? Why not a tattoo? Or, how about getting different wardrobes, and shopping as a couple so the spouse knows what you purchased. (Though perhaps everyone has the same sense of style...) How about living in different places so you don't run in to each other so often? I mean, really, a joint wedding and then a joint honeymoon? And why is it the women who will be getting the surgery? Hmmm?

And, if you are willing to do this in the first place, does it even matter if you are with your sister's husband? I mean, what does it really matter at that point, you haven't asserted any individuality.


Can you imagine as a future genealogist trying to identify who is who in photographs? What a B-I-T-C-H! And, how similarly will the children look to one another? What a freaky idea to contemplate.

AND, of course, this could all be baloney, as the title suggests... 'This must be true, I read it in the tabloids.' Man, I was actually getting my panties in a bunch there....

1919 - April Report

Another busy month of moving around for the 580th.

I can understand the progress until Herb mentions Romorantin.... which if I found the 'right' one, it is back south of Paris.

Eat junk food now, pay the price later

We hear about ourselves, Americans, all the time. I don't think I knew that this was true about the British, as well.

by Sarah Boseley at The Guardian (in the UK), but I found it at the Week in the February 12th edition.

Our atrocious eating habits are going to bankrupt the nation, said Sarah Boseley. In one London borough, Tower Hamlets, one in four kids is obese by age 11—and it’s easy to see why. In that district, home to a street known as the “chicken-shop mile,” fried chicken shops outnumber high schools 42 to one. A vitamin-free diet of fat, grease, and sugary soda leaves the neighborhood’s children both overweight and undernourished. Later in life, those same kids will be at heightened risk of heart disease and cancer. That’s a problem not just for them, but for all of us, because our taxpayer-funded National Health Service will have to treat them. Already, more than 65 percent of English men are obese. “If as a nation we keep piling on the pounds around the waistline,” says NHS England director Simon Stevens, “we’ll be piling on the pounds in terms of future taxes needed just to keep the NHS afloat.” Already, Britain spends more on obesity-related health care than on the police, the fire service, prisons, and the entire criminal justice system combined. It’s no longer enough to have a health-care system that simply treats obese people’s illnesses. The government must do something to stop them from getting fat in the first place.

It Must be True... I read it in the tabloids

I guess I found a lot in the February 12th edition of the Week, though I probably read the magazine much later...

WTF? Get this woman some Rakfisk (fermented fish) so that she can populate her microbiome with some beneficial bacteria!

A Norwegian woman believes she was “born into the wrong species” and is in fact a cat trapped in a human’s body. The 20-year-old, known as Nano, realized she was a feline four years ago, and has since taken to padding around her house on her hands and knees, while wearing a fake cat’s tail, ears, and a pair of pink fluffy paws with which to groom herself. She frequently meows, and claims she has a feline ability to see in the dark as well as a cat’s loathing of water and dogs. “My psychologist told me I can grow out of it,” Nano says, “but I doubt it.”

I mention the fermented foods only because it seems there are a lot of connections between gut health and mental health through the vagus nerve.

Her Search For Her Mother Touches An Entire Chinese City

This story made me cry when I heard it the other day - one of those stories that you stay in your car to hear the whole thing, even though you have arrived at your destination.

I wanted to embed the interview, but I am not clever enough to figure out how to include it. Click here to find it.

Jenna Cook was born in China and abandoned on a street in the huge city of Wuhan in 1992 when she was just a baby.

Cook was adopted by a single American woman, a schoolteacher in Massachusetts, and later co-adopted by her godmother, who is her mother's partner.

Cook was accepted at Yale University, and at 20, she decided to go back to Wuhan in search of her birth mother.

A local newspaper in Wuhan wrote an article about her, touching off a strong response in the city and far beyond. Cook says she was contacted by people in every province in China. Some said they had given up children and others said they were simply taken by her quest.

Cook ultimately met with 50 families to see if she was their daughter.

In those talks, she discovered many things, including the collective pain of Chinese families who had given up children. In most cases, the families had wanted a boy and decided to give up the child when it turned out to be a girl.

Her efforts in China became her college thesis at Yale and an article in Foreign Policy. She spoke about her experience with Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep.

On how she went about searching

Maybe it was really naive of me, but I was hoping that maybe somebody would see my face and think, "Oh, she kind of looks like my cousin," or something like that. Like maybe my own body could serve as a type of evidence of my family, of where I come from, my own genes. I also ended up publicizing the story in Wuhan through the newspapers and through the television.

On who came to see her

In the end we met with almost 50 families that summer. So we heard 50 different stories, and I imagined that it would be mostly women, but I was definitely wrong. There were birth mothers who came alone, but there were also many birth fathers who came alone, and some families brought like the entire family. There would be moms and dads with the grandparents and then other siblings and then the grandkids. There would be like eight or nine people in the room. It was really incredible.

On what she heard from birth families

If I had to kind of extract one coherent narrative, I think they talked a lot about missing this daughter and they really worried about her. They wanted to know if she had survived and if she was OK — kind of like people coming out of a war or refugees or someone emerging from a large disaster and just wondering if the other side had also survived as they had.

On parents who hoped she might be their daughter

One birth mother brought a piece of cloth. She had used the cloth 20 years ago to sew a baby suit for the day that she and her daughter would part. And then she hoped that if she and her daughter were to reunite later, her daughter would have the baby suit and then she would have the scrap. It would be kind of like a lock and key. But I definitely didn't have such a baby suit.

On what she heard from mothers who gave up a baby

For most people it was the combination of needing a son, wanting a son, and also the fact that they already had so many children. I have to say, it was surprising, because in the U.S. we hear "one-child policy," we think, "Oh, there's just one child that the families kept." But I don't think I met any families with one child. They all had like three, four, five, six, seven or even eight children, and there was a pattern in that most of the children of higher birth order were female and then they would keep having children until they had a son. And so the missing daughter was usually not the first daughter. They would usually keep that one. The missing daughter was usually the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, etc.

On whether she found her birth family

I didn't. But I feel like going through the search and listening to the different stories has given me some idea of who they might be or what kinds of things they might have confronted. I am still looking but in a less active way. My DNA was left at a local police station. I figure I just kind of leave it up to fate.

I put one copy of the search poster in my file at the orphanage. It was like the first 30 pages were all other people writing about me, this small infant with no voice and really no ability to choose her destination or fate in the world. And to be able to come back 20 years later with a search poster that I had written about myself and to kind of add that in as the last page, that was really something that felt satisfying.

Controlling parents, mean kids

You thought I was MIA, didn't you? I suppose I have; lots going on.

In the meantime:

Totally scary! (And the study was with girls, no less. What about the boys?) I am very worried about the effects of helicopter parents. The whole idea of them terrifies me in general. I try to imagine what parenting was like in the past... I certainly didn't feel watched over all the time. We did have TV, though we were not aloud to watch a lot of it. We did play with neighborhood friends a lot... and even on the slow streets behind our houses.

The toxic effects of helicopter parenting may not end once children head off to college. A new study shows that undergrads who’ve been raised by controlling, manipulative moms and dads may take their anger and stress out on other students. Researchers from the University of Vermont interviewed 180 predominantly female college students about their relationship with their parents as well as their tendency to behave aggressively. Those with domineering parents were more likely to exhibit “relational aggression,” which often involves spreading rumors and backstabbing as well as excluding or publicly embarrassing friends, reports Medical Daily. The students’ physiological response to stress influences how they unleash this hostility on their peers, the study shows. Those who perspired more and grew more agitated while recounting a difficult experience were considered impulsive, while the students who sweated less and reacted calmly were deemed more calculating and manipulative. “If you’re calm, you can be strategic and planned in your aggression,” says lead researcher Jamie Abaied. “You can really use your aggression to control your relationship and stay dominant over your peers.”

Taken from The Week, the February 12th edition.