Men should favour weight lifting and running over cycling in order to preserve their bones, scientists have said after a study suggested brittle bone disorders are more common than previously thought.
Scientists measuring the bone density of men and women between the ages of 35 and 50 found 28 per cent of men showed precursor signs of osteoporosis, compared to 26 per cent of women.
The results are surprising because the debilitating condition, which affects around three million people in the UK, is more commonly associated with women than men.
Our civilization is made up of countless individuals and pieces of material technology, which come together to form institutions and interdependent systems of logistics, development and production. These institutions and systems then store the knowledge required for their own renewal and growth.
We pin the hopes of our common human project on this renewal and growth of the whole civilization. Whether this project is going well is a challenging but vital question to answer.
History shows us we are not safe from institutional collapse. Advances in technology mitigate some aspects, but produce their own risks. Agile institutions that make use of both social and technical knowledge not only mitigate such risks, but promise unprecedented human flourishing.
Watch this video where we investigate this landscape, evaluate our odds, and try to plot a better course.
Samo Burja is a sociologist and the founder of Bismarck Analysis, a firm that analyzes institutions, from governments to companies. His research work focuses on the causes of societal decay and flourishing. He writes on history, epistemology and strategy.
The philosopher John Locke, who believed that true knowledge of the world could only stem from sensory experiences, thought that blind individuals could never understand the concepts of light and color. Locke, it turns out, was wrong. In a recent PNASstudy, blind people demonstrate that they do understand what sighted people process through vision, proving that “visual” ideas don’t actually require sight.
In the study published Tuesday, scientists demonstrated how blind people make visual sense of what they cannot see. While previous studies suggested that the most efficient way for a blind person to know that, say, a flamingo is pink, is to memorize that fact, this study demonstrates that blind people instead look at the world like scientists and make sense of the visual world through a catalogue of clues.
“First-person experience isn’t the only way to develop a rich understanding of the world around us,” co-author and Johns Hopkins doctoral candidate Judy Kimexplains. “People often have the intuition that we can’t know what we can’t see.”
A volcano erupted on the Indonesian island of Bali Saturday, sending ash into the sky over surrounding villages and lava pouring down its sides.
The island’s Mount Agung put national agencies on notice, causing some flight cancellations but no reported casualties with the eruption, which reportedly spread lava and incandescent rocks over about two miles.
The national disaster agency said Mount Agung’s eruption lasted four minutes and 30 seconds, according to multiple reports.
Microorganisms like bacteria and fungi are increasingly becoming resistant to our best drugs, which is hurtling us towards a terrifying future where once-easily-treated infections become potentially life-threatening again. In a new approach to this problem, researchers from the University at Buffalo and Temple University have tested an alternative to antibiotics that uses existing drugs to starve a fungal infection of vital nutrients.
In Japan people can expect to live beyond 84 years on average—yet in Lesotho life expectancy is just 53 years. The age at which people die still depends a lot on where they live.
