WASHINGTON (AP) — A vaccine to fight dementia? It turns out there may already be one – shots that prevent painful shingles also appear to protect aging brains.
A new study found shingles vaccination cut older adults’ risk of developing dementia over the next seven years by 20%.
I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.
“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”
“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.
She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.
When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.
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If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.
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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn’t used to it, and it gets easier the more often it’s done. When it’s done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.
An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.
U.S. stocks plunge minutes into trading day as tariffs slam global markets
Wall Street investors kicked off the trading day with major selling. Japan’s main stock index slid 2.7% and Europe’s Stoxx 600 was down more than 2.2%.
What they don’t tell you about speaking multiple languages is that your brain does not in fact have a box labeled Spanish and another one labeled German. Instead it has a box labeled “Not English” and sometimes when you’re talking or writing in one of the languages you speak it will just start pulling random words from that box.
I just wrote down “Tengo eine Katze” and then put my head in my hands
Whenever someone addresses me in a language I don’t understand my first reflex is to answer in Norwegian. It’s just unfortunate if the person was in fact speaking Italian or Czech.
I am only fluent in English and I have a few words in Korean and Spanish but it still happens, I’ll be trying to say no in Spanish and my brain is like here is the non English word you are looking for and it’s 아니
thrilled to report this doesn’t just happen for verbal languages. my brain will present a welsh word when i’m trying to remember a sign and vice-versa
hey everyone, great news! starting monday we’re relaxing our don’t-piss-in-the-pool requirements and no longer mandating that swimmers control their bladders while in the water. of course if you’re more comfortable not pissing in the pool, you may continue to do so – everyone should make the pee decision that feels safest for them and their family. please respect everyone’s choice about where to pee. thanks 😊
fantastic update, our restaurant has lifted its smoking ban and is now smoking-optional. you may continue to not smoke inside if you’d prefer, but we’re excited to now offer our guests the freedom to make everyone else in this enclosed airspace inhale whatever particulates they’d like to release via combustion. if you have like some kind of health problem or whatever, you are totally welcome to choose not to smoke. we’re very excited to be getting back to normal!
True. Most Irish people, as Norwegians do with Trolls, will happily let the ‘fairies’ be a thing to make tours for tourists and idle threats to make children behave. Most Irish people will have a very normal and mature explanation of fairies as a common folk mythology that expresses some dimension of Irish culture but are not, obviously, to be taken literally.
And most Irish people, if you ask them to move a stone from a fairy circle will immoveably, flatly respond with ‘absolutely fucking not’.
Construction projects have had to halt and be abandoned for it.
At work me and a couple coworkers (black, white, and mexican) had a fun discussion on whether there are more ghosts at a hospital or a cemetery.
everyone individually took a moment to specify that ghosts probably aren’t REAL real. then weighed in on where and why.
for the record my position was that there’s probably way more ghosts in hospitals because that’s where people die horribly, but since you can only see ghosts in dark, solitary conditions, graveyards at night is where the majority of ghost sightings occur. hospitals are usually well lit and busy, so even if they’re crammed with ghosts the living are too damn busy to see them. meanwhile if a cemetery has even one ghost that followed her corpse there from the hospital, she’ll be spotted because that’s where all the ghost hunters go to look.
this theory was received as extremely sensible, and a coworker drew the conclusion that that’s why abandoned hospitals are even scarier than graveyards. once the place gets abandoned then you can tell how much ghosts got built up.
we all liked this explanation a lot and explained it to everyone else all night. and of course, none of us believe in ghosts.
Beliefs that are more interacted with than believed are so awesome sometimes.
Like this magical supernatural entity almost certainly doesn’t actually exist, but that’s no excuse to be impolite to them.
ALT
amhrancas 