Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Eef Hogervorst, Professor of Biological Psychology, Loughborough University

The Mediterranean diet – rich in olive oil, fish, vegetables and legumes – has long been linked to better heart health. Growing evidence suggests it may also help support brain health as we age, with a brain-focused variation of the diet drawing increasing scientific attention.

It is called the Mind diet. The name stands for Mediterranean-Dash Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay – though what matters more than the acronym is what it actually involves: plenty of green vegetables, beans, whole grains, nuts, berries, poultry and fish, with olive oil as the main cooking fat, and limited amounts of red meat, butter, cheese, fried food and sweets. It combines the most brain-friendly elements of two well-studied eating patterns: the traditional Mediterranean diet and the Dash diet, which was originally developed to lower blood pressure.

A recent analysis from the long-running Framingham heart study examined the diets of adults aged 60 and over and assessed how these dietary patterns were associated with brain scan data collected later in the study. Those who followed the Mind diet most closely tended to have more grey matter – the tissue associated with memory and decision-making – and showed less overall loss of brain volume over time.

Both findings point in the same direction: that this way of eating may help keep the brain in better shape as we get older.

This is not the first study to suggest a link between diet and dementia risk. An earlier analysis combining 12 observational studies found an overall reduction in dementia risk of between 15 and 22% among people who followed Mediterranean-style diets, with the Mind diet showing the strongest effect of the three patterns studied. That is a meaningful difference, even if it cannot be taken as proof that diet alone is responsible.

Within the Framingham study, berries and poultry stood out as particularly beneficial for grey matter. This fits with what other research has suggested. Blueberries, for instance, have been the subject of several small trials, with one recent study finding improvements in memory even in people already showing early signs of memory problems.

Since red and processed meat have been linked to higher dementia risk in other studies, replacing them with chicken may be part of why poultry appears beneficial.

Some of the findings were less straightforward. Fried food, as expected, was associated with worse outcomes. But whole grains, generally considered one of the healthier staples, produced a surprisingly weak result.

The reasons are unclear, though large amounts of bread and pasta – even wholegrain varieties – may raise blood sugar enough to offset some of the benefits. The evidence on whole grains and brain health remains mixed, and this is one area where more research is needed.

It is also worth noting who, in the Framingham study, was most likely to follow the Mind diet. They tended to be women, non-smokers, well-educated, and less likely to be overweight or to have diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease. All of these factors are independently associated with better brain health, which makes it genuinely difficult to untangle how much of the benefit comes from the diet itself, and how much from the broader lifestyle it tends to accompany.

What the science can and can’t tell us

This is the central challenge facing all research in this area. Most of the studies are observational, meaning they track what people eat and what happens to them over time, rather than randomly assigning people to follow a particular diet and measuring the results.

Observational studies can show associations, but they cannot prove cause and effect. Self-reported diet data is also unreliable at the best of times – and particularly so among people whose memory is already beginning to fail.

The few trials that have actually put the Mind diet to the test have produced mixed results. One small three-month study found no improvement in memory or thinking skills, though participants did report better mood and quality of life.

Another trial found improvements in both brain scans and mental performance, but the participants were obese middle-aged women who also lost weight during the study, making it hard to know how much the diet itself contributed. Three months is also a short window in which to expect measurable changes in brain structure, and longer trials may yet tell a different story.

None of this means the Mind diet is not worth following. The broader evidence – across multiple studies and populations – consistently points in the same direction, and there is little downside to eating more vegetables, berries, fish and olive oil.

But diet is only one piece of a much larger picture. Not smoking, staying active, keeping blood pressure and blood sugar under control, and maintaining social connections all appear to matter at least as much when it comes to keeping the brain healthy in later life.

The Mind diet is not a cure for dementia, and it would be misleading to present it as one. What the evidence does suggest is that the food choices we make over decades – not just in later life, but across adulthood – may quietly shape the health of our brains in ways that only become visible much later. That is not a guarantee, but it is a reasonable basis for eating well.

Eef Hogervorst previously acted as consultant for Proctor and Gamble to review nutritional supplements and dementia risk/memory impairment. She received funding from ARUK, ISPF and ESRC to investigate (nutritional) risk factors for dementia. She also received PhD funding from DMT, Loughborough University and Universitas Indonesia She is a Chartered Psychologist with the BPS and holds an active BPS membership. She acted as expert on dementia risk and hormone treatment for NICE (2024) and ESHRE (2016) Guidelines.

– ref. This Mediterranean-style diet could keep your brain sharp as you age – new study – https://theconversation.com/this-mediterranean-style-diet-could-keep-your-brain-sharp-as-you-age-new-study-278461

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Robert W Jones, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Leeds

It is a truth, though not one universally acknowledged, that a country house possessed of spacious grounds must be in want of a large fortune. A film or television company might offer one, or at least an honourable provision.

The forthcoming marriage of Harewood House in west Yorkshire to Netflix, is much like any other in this respect. The union will produce a new version of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (from whose work I have been very obviously scrumping), to be released later this year. Harewood will become Pemberley, Mr Darcy’s famously enticing home. Yorkshire will pose as Derbyshire.

Harewood is a grand house. Whether it is too grand for Pemberley is hard to say. In the book, Mr Darcy’s annual income of £10,000 is a huge sum. But the house might be contested in other ways too.

The estate has been the seat of the Lascelles family since 1738, when the Gawthorpe and Harewood Castle estates were acquired with money gained in the West Indies, from owning enslaved people, plantations, ships, warehouses and their associated goods and crops (as the estate’s website explains). The current owners, aware of the implications of the source of their inheritance, are among the cofounders of the Heirs of Slavery group, which advocates for compensation to address the ongoing consequences of slavery.

Built between 1759 and 1771, the house boasts interiors designed by fashionable architect Robert Adam and furniture by Thomas Chippendale. Its serious art collection features Sir Joshua Reynolds, J.M.W Turner, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Reynolds’s painting Mrs Hale as Euphrosyne (1762-64) graces, as she should, the splendid Adam-designed music room.

Read more:
Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter captures the spirit of two great geniuses, born 250 years ago

Historian Mark Girouard’s classic study Life in an English County House: A Social and Architectural History (1978) still helpfully explains places like Harewood. He writes that these houses served several functions; business and work for much of the time, though the labour that sustained its splendours occurred in the Caribbean. They were also spaces intended for leisure and diverse forms of public and private sociability. Each activity was allocated (if imperfectly) different spaces within the house.

More recent studies academic studies, such as Karen Lipsedge’s Domestic Space in the British Eighteenth-Century Novel (2012) have developed this interest, explaining how space and gender interconnect. The music room at Harewood, with Mrs Hale as its central focus, would have held a special function in this respect.

Visiting Pemberley

Great houses like Harewood were designed to receive and impress guests. Any visitor would have needed to negotiate the shifting codes of privacy and publicity that might be in play (they were never static).

Read more:
Netflix to remake Pride and Prejudice – why Jane Austen novels make perfect period adaptations

The further into a house you were allowed, the more you entered a private realm where distinctions of rank might be in abeyance. In Pride and Prejudice the awful Lady Catherine de Bourgh knows this, doesn’t care and ploughs on. She enters the intimate space of the Bennet family’s drawing room where she expects to be accorded all respective and deference. Brilliantly, she isn’t. But she cannot be refused either and is guided to the more public realm of the garden.

In their Georgian heydays great houses like Harewood would have received many inveigling visitors, though they were not all like the bumptious, bungling de Bourgh. It is in this capacity that Pemberley is encountered in Pride and Prejudice, though its eligible but prideful owner (Darcy) has made the house intriguing long before.

Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, take their tour of the Derbyshire at the opening of the third volume of the novel. Elizabeth is still composing herself after the horrors of Darcy’s proposal and the revelations of his letter, detailing Mr Wickham’s atrocious conduct with its obvious implications for her young sister. As soon as Elizabeth sees the house and its grounds, she is taken with it and reflects: “To be mistress of Pemberley might be something.”

While the house is praised repeatedly in the novel, it is the views from Pemberley, not the “fine carpets and satin curtains” (which any house might have) which appear to attract Elizabeth most. There are several references to windows, and what can be seen from them in these scenes.

If Darcy is redeemed in Elizabeth’s eyes at Pemberley, it is partly because he proves himself to be a good landlord. The change in Austen scholarship, especially since the last Pride and Prejudice adaptation, has been tremendous. Elizabeth has appeared more and more independent, less easily impressed by Darcy. Her perspective is now seen as far more important than all his trees, however much they convey his status.

Harewood and its prospects have changed too since Austen’s day. The landscape has altered. From some of Harewood’s windows you can still see what remains of Lancelot “Capability” Brown’s improvements: his clumps of trees and the great lake he introduced. But the Victorians removed a great deal.

What will the new Elizabeth see from Harewood — and what, in turn, will the viewer see? How might the new Darcy delight and interest his guest? Not by plunging into the lake surely. And from which window might Elizabeth finally catch that brilliant view?

Robert W Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Netflix’s new Pride and Prejudice features Harewood House as Pemberley – here’s what the estate reveals about Austen’s world – https://theconversation.com/netflixs-new-pride-and-prejudice-features-harewood-house-as-pemberley-heres-what-the-estate-reveals-about-austens-world-277786

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tim Fowler, Associate Professor in Political Theory, University of Bristol

Countries around the world, including France, Spain and Malaysia, are planning to following Australia in enacting a ban on young people using social media. And now the UK is considering moving in the same direction.

These bans have emerged out of concerns about the effects of social media on children’s mental health, and increasing attempts to regulate teenage life. The UK recently brought in a “lifetime” smoking ban for anyone aged 15 or younger.

The potential ban on social media use is often explicitly justified by the support of parents. When announcing her party’s support for the measure, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said she knew “as a parent” that a ban was needed. It is seen as common sense that parents are leading proponents of these bans.

Bans offer two core promises to parents. They offer protection from the perceived harms of social media, and greater simplicity in managing day-to-day life. Rather than parents having to negotiate their child’s social media, parents may believe that once a ban is in place, they can simply say to their children that this behaviour is not allowed.

Official sanction can be used by parents as evidence that society views children’s use of social media as unacceptable. But in order to fulfil these promises, bans would need to be highly effective and socially endorsed. There are strong reasons to think this won’t be the case.

Teenage rebellion

Far from being passive, teenagers are technologically literate, socially networked and highly motivated. Recent UK experience with age verification for certain websites shows how quickly workarounds spread.

Since the passing of the Online Safety Act, the UK has seen a huge surge in downloads of virtual private networks (VPNs). These allow users to register as being from a different country to the one they are physically in. Teenagers may be able to use VPNs to bypass the bans.

They can also circumvent parental controls in less technologically savvy ways. This might mean buying a burner phone from a friend to access social media outside of their parents’ evening restrictions. Anecdotally, there are similar accounts of school children finding workarounds to avoid the increasingly prevalent “pouches” that restrict access to smartphones during the school day.

The larger lesson here is that by forcing behaviour to become covert, parents can often lose oversight of what their children are doing.

These examples are not too different to traditional tricks to get around social bans, like having a fake ID or getting an older friend to purchase cigarettes or alcohol. If parents reflect on their own experiences of teenage life, it may be evident why the act of banning does not eliminate this behaviour – and may even increase its attraction.

Even more importantly, as we also know in relation to alcohol or sexual activity, just because it is prohibited doesn’t take away the necessity of parents having conversations with their children about these topics.

Parents know that even if they harshly sanction their children for underage drinking, their child’s peers may have parents who turn a blind eye, condone alcohol, or supply it themselves. This means that getting teenagers to think about their use is essential – and the same holds true for social media.

Whether there is a ban or not, prohibited teenage behaviour continues. Navigating these risks is an unavoidable part of parenting adolescents.

As we have argued, parenting should be seen less as about achieving specified outcomes, and more as about valuing the individual relationship.

Putting the relationship between parent and child centre-stage means recognising there are different positions on the use and value of social media, and managing those differences successfully.

While digital life is novel and frankly scary to some parents, seeing the issue in a wider context of teenage life – sometimes risky, contested and hidden – makes these new issues more explicable to older generations.

Just as parenting requires understanding why a young person might choose to drink, have sex or use drugs, the case of social media also depends on understanding teenagers’ (online) worlds. This means engaging with the value and benefits of social media, and gaining some understanding of what platforms are being used and their content.

This is not to say that more effective regulation is impossible, just as legal regulation is important for other dangers that children and teenagers face. However, such regulation will not – and cannot – take away parents’ involvement, and its related challenges.

Funding provided by Economic and Social Research Council (ES/W002639/1) for Centre for Socio-Digital Futures ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures | Research | University of Bristol

Tim Fowler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why social media bans won’t make parenting teenagers easier – https://theconversation.com/why-social-media-bans-wont-make-parenting-teenagers-easier-275263

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kit Yates, Professor of Mathematical Biology and Public Engagement, University of Bath

Warning this article contains spoilers about the new Amazon Prime series Young Sherlock.

I’ve read the whole Sherlock Holmes canon multiple times over. I love how Holmes uses analytical reasoning to unravel problems that look mysterious, but ultimately prove to have simple explanations. So I was excited when I saw Guy Ritchie’s Young Sherlock appear on Amazon Prime. My excitement was quickly tempered when I started watching, though.

A key part of the plot relies on mathematics. Holmes first meets his sidekick Moriarty (yes, he is working together with his future adversary) at the blackboard after a maths lecture at Oxford. Despite some mistakes in the dialogue, the maths on the blackboard is interesting enough. It is finding the solutions to the equation x⁵ + x⁴ + x³ + x² + x + 1 = 0. As shown nicely in this video, the equation has five solutions.

In the maths many of us will have learned at school, we are taught that a positive times a positive makes a positive and that a negative times a negative also makes a positive. For example, 3 times 3 equals 9, but -3 times -3 also equals 9. Squaring a number (when you multiply a number by itself) should always give a positive result. The reverse operation – finding the number(s) you multiply together to give a positive number – is called taking the square root. The two square roots of 9 are 3 and -3, since when you square either of these numbers you get the answer 9.

Read more:
Taking a leap of faith into imaginary numbers opens new doors in the real world through complex analysis

If we want to take the square root of -1, say, then we need to venture into the realm of imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers are the square roots of negative numbers. Mathematicians defined the imaginary number i to be the square root of -1 (technically -1 has two square roots i and -i). The square roots of other negative numbers are multiples of i. The square roots of -9, for example are 3i and -3i. Some of the solutions from the equation on the blackboard involve imaginary numbers (this will turn out to be an important plot point).

Mathematical blunders

It’s plausible that the equation on the blackboard might appear in an early first year undergraduate tutorial. Something approaching a passable solution is given, but in excruciating detail (the sort of detail you wouldn’t use at school, let alone in a maths degree at Oxford). And there are mistakes in the maths.

Towards the end of the lecture, the professor sets the students homework to find all the solutions to the equation, even though they are already written on the board (although incorrectly). Despite this, the end of the scene sees Sherlock spending some time trying to think of the solutions before Moriarty comes up and shows him two of the five solutions (as if they were the only ones). Moriarty too writes these down incorrectly, but in a different way to the incorrectness already on the board.

As Moriarty writes down the complex solution (complex means the answer contains both real and imaginary numbers) he says “These solutions, they’re not real. They’re imaginary.” which we can allow (although technically he means complex).

What we can’t forgive is Moriarty going on to say, “That means even if you can’t see the target, you can still shoot for it.” Which is nonsense, even as a metaphor. Complex numbers aren’t targets you can’t see, but well-defined, mainstream (even in the 1870s) mathematical quantities and there’s no sense in which you “aim at” a complex solution to an equation.

Death by numbers

In the last episode, Holmes and his team are battling to halt the distribution of a deadly chemical weapon known as the “creeping death”. They find a scrap of paper in a secret room which they say is the “equation for creating the creeping death.”

I was expecting to see some complex chemical reaction formulae sketched on the page, but when it’s held up to the camera, we see instead a mathematical equation: z³ + 4 z² – 10 z + 12 = 0.

What does this have to do with the chemical process for creating the deadly nerve agent?

Nothing, it turns out. Or at least nothing I can imagine. In fact it’s a device to allow Holmes and Moriarty to hark back to that moment in the lecture theatre when they first met. What follows goes beyond artistic license into the realm of gibberish.

“If we have the positive equation”, they say, “then we can come up with the negative. And thus create a compound to neutralise the threat of creeping death.” Perhaps they meant “positive solution”, because equations themselves aren’t positive or negative. Either way, the idea that this simple mathematical equation or its solutions are the secret formula for making a weapon of mass destruction doesn’t make sense. There’s no context, no sense in which this equation could be the secret recipe for creating the nerve agent.

Moriarty points out that they have a problem. “This equation is not finished.” By this I think he means that the three solutions to the equation are not written out explicitly.

One solution, z = – 6 is given. And it’s correct. The rest of the scrap of paper contains a reformulation of the equation (a factorisation), which shows that the remaining solutions can be found by solving a quadratic equation: z² – 2 z + 2 = 0.

A quadratic equation is just an equation built around a squared term (in this case z^2), which has two solutions. The formula for the solutions may be familiar to GCSE students (normally aged 15 to 17 years old). For a general quadratic equation: a z² + b z + c = 0, the two solutions are given below.

Yet, we are supposed to believe that, despite having supposedly solved a far more complicated equation than this in the first episode, Moriarty can’t find the solution to this much simpler equation. So stumped is Moriarty – the future maths professor – that he spends precious time, as a bomb is about to detonate, searching for a piece of paper with this missing solution. He almost loses his life when he could have just used a GCSE-level formula.

The piece of paper he eventually finds contains an incorrect statement of the quadratic formula alongside some nonsensical text, although the solutions are at least correct: z = 1 + i and z = 1 – i (where i, remember, is the imaginary number).

I appreciate my dissection of the maths is high-grade nerdery. Most people will have watched the series without pausing it like I did to look at the maths and probably won’t have noticed. But, if maths is going to be a pivotal plot point in your blockbuster series, then you’ll probably want to make sure you get it right.

Kit Yates does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The mathematical crimes of the Young Sherlock Holmes series – https://theconversation.com/the-mathematical-crimes-of-the-young-sherlock-holmes-series-278812