Brains do not slow down until after age of 60, study finds

It is widely accepted as one of life’s bleak but unavoidable facts: as we get older, our brains get slower. But now a study, based on data from more than 1 million people, suggests that mental processing speed remains almost constant until the age of 60.

The analysis puts perceived reductions in speed down to people becoming more cautious as they get older. This could account for the large body of research that has concluded that mental processing speed peaks at about the age of 20 and undergoes a steady decline from that point onwards.

“Our finding is encouraging, as our results show that average levels in mental speed in contexts demanding fast and forced decisions do not decline until relatively late in the lifespan,” said Dr Mischa von Krause, of Heidelberg University and first author of the work.

The study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, used data from 1,185,882 participants, aged 10 to 80 years, in Harvard’s Project Implicit, an online tool that has been used to collect data and educate people about biases they hold on gender, race and other characteristics.

Participants are required to sort words into positive and negative categories, while also assigning image to racial categories. The test is primarily designed to measure the strength of a person’s associations between race (in this case black or white people) and evaluations (represented by positive or negative words), but the latest analysis simply used the age of the participants, their response times and accuracy.

The data showed, as previous studies have done, that average time to give a correct response peaked at about 20 years. However, the researchers argue that this metric also captures how cautious a person is in delivering their answer and also their basic motor reaction speeds.

By using machine learning, the researchers aimed to extract more information about these two hidden factors from patterns in the data. For instance, if someone consistently responded more slowly, regardless of the difficulty of a given question, the model might be more likely to attribute this to slow motor responses.

The analysis suggested that 20-year-olds were quickest because they were the most willing to trade accuracy for speed. The researchers concluded that the purely mechanical part of the response (how fast a person sees the question and taps the keyboard) was quickest in those aged 14-16. Mental processing speed appeared to peak about age 30, and declined only very slightly between 30 and 60. Participants also made fewer mistakes as they became older, at least until the age of about 60.

Dr Joshua Hartshorne, a psychologist at Boston College who was not involved in the latest work, said the machine learning method used was impressive and would prompt psychologists to reconsider some earlier findings based simply on response times. “This joins a body of work suggesting that the way mental abilities change throughout life is complicated and we don’t really know what’s going on,” he said. “But whatever’s going on, it’s definitely not that we peak at 20 and go downhill from there.”

Von Krause said the work raised the suggestion that people may excel at different tasks depending on their age. “Obviously, there are real-life tasks where it is crucial to avoid mistakes, such as in a medical diagnosis, while in other tasks, such as avoiding an obstacle on the road, speed is more important,” he said. However, he added that, within certain limits, people were likely to be able to adapt their decision-making style to suit the demands of a situation.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/feb/17/brains-do-not-slow-down-until-after-age-of-60-study-finds

UK: Turning over a new leaf: the humble hedge stages a remarkable comeback

The emerald-green five-year-old hawthorn hedge glistens in autumnal sunshine. In the cider apple orchard and grass pastures below, younger hedges shoot off towards a fast-flowing trout stream.

History has come full circle in Blackmore Farm, which nestles in the foothills of the Quantocks in Somerset. The owner, Ian Dyer, remembers helping his father, who arrived as a tenant farmer in the 1950s, grub out old hedges in the 1960s and 1970s. But – like increasing numbers of landowners – he has hired a hedgelayer to bring back his hedges to provide habitats for wildlife, capture carbon and slow water pouring off fields into rivers.

“In my life, I’ve probably taken out three miles of hedge. It was seen as progress at the time. The government was pushing for more and more production,” he says, standing in the long grass on his 750-acre arable and beef farm. “But we are putting back all the ancient hedgerows. History is cyclical – it all goes around.”

Dyer, 62, has planted 1km of new hedges in the last five years and has noticed more insects, nesting birds and small mammals, including water voles, since the work started.

One study found that hedgerows provide 21 ecosystem services – more than any other habitat.“My views have changed in the last 10 years. I want to live in a green and pleasant land – not in a [ecological] desert,” he remarks. “It’s starting to look like I remember it as a five-year-old boy.”

The National Hedgelaying Society, which held its national championship event this weekend, says its members have been inundated with requests to lay hedges this season, which runs from September to April. “There is more work than anyone could ever do for the rest of their lives,” says Claire Maymon, one of the charity’s trustees. “Our founders in the 1970s were worried the craft would be lost for ever, but now we are worried that we don’t have enough young hedgelayers coming through to meet demand.”

The Campaign to Protect Rural England estimates that over 25,000 workers will be needed to deliver on the Committee on Climate Change’s call to plant 200,000km of new hedges in the UK. The committee has calculated that the nation’s hedgerows will have to be expanded by 40% in order to reach net-zero by 2050.

The environment secretary, George Eustice, has called hedges important ecological building blocks that provide shelter, nesting habitat, flowers and berries for a wide range of wildlife. The government wants the post-Brexit agricultural subsidy system to encourage farmers to better maintain hedges. A pilot scheme, offering farmers up to £24 per 100 metres of hedgerows, starts next month.

Hedges need to be carefully managed throughout their lives, otherwise they thin and eventually gaps appear. Paul Lamb, the hedgelayer helping to transform Dyer’s farm, “pleaches” – or splits – hawthorn, blackthorn and spindle stems so that they grow back dense and thick next spring. “Every hedgelayer has their own style,” he says, pushing back a prickly curtain of foliage to reveal a complex, woody interior. “For me, it’s so satisfying to plant and lay a hedge and then see it full of birds, insects and wildlife.”

Business is booming for Lamb, who lives in a converted horsebox on a nearby farm. He has never been busier, with commercial farmers making up a growing proportion of his work. Lamb’s two biggest jobs this season are on farms, with 850 metres of replanting on one farm and six weeks work laying more than 500 metres of hedgerow on another.

“When I started hedging, it was a way of earning a bit of beer money on a Saturday. I would never have expected to be booked up for a whole season. But here I am, booked up for this season and half of the next – and still people are phoning me with jobs. There is a renewed interest in conservation and craft – and a feeling that we need to live in a more sustainable way.”

Britain lost half its hedgerows in the decades after the second world war as farmers were encouraged to create large arable fields to increase production. Since then, legal protections have been introduced and hedges are no longer being ripped out – but the decline has continued due to poor management, including some landowners over-trimming hedges mechanically, without simulating new growth below. But the growing demand for traditional hedgelaying leaves many in the craft feeling optimistic.

Nigel Adams sits on the HedgeLink steering group, which advises Defra. He says there has has been a sea-change in attitudes, with everyone from the National Farming Union to Natural England calling for more hedges. “Hedgerows have gone unnoticed for years but suddenly everybody is realising they are the veins of our countryside,” he says.

Adams, who lays hedges throughout the country, including on Prince Charles’s estates, believes the role of hedges should not be underestimated. “Insects follow hedges and bats hunt along hedges,” he says. “If we didn’t have hedgerows, then we would be living in a barren wasteland.”

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/uknews/turning-over-a-new-leaf-the-humble-hedge-stages-a-remarkable-comeback/ar-AAPROn3?ocid=chromentpnews

Who was the first person on record to write about the British Isles?

 
The British Isles, tucked away in the northwest of Europe, has been inhabited by humans since Paleolithic times, but the people who lived there didn't develop a writing system until much later, and the first local account of the isles did not appear until Anglo-Saxon times, around the seventh century A.D.

So who was the first person to write about the British Isles and describe its inhabitants? To find out, we need to look to the south — to the Mediterranean world of the ancient Greeks.

A Greek mariner named Pytheas made the first recorded voyage to the British Isles in the fourth century B.C. He circumnavigated the island of Britain, explored the northern lands of Europe and was the first to describe the Celtic tribes of Britain, the midnight sun, dramatic tidal shifts and polar ice. When he returned home, he wrote an account called "On the Ocean" ("Peri tou Okeanou" in Greek) that circulated widely throughout the ancient world and was read, discussed and debated by scholars for centuries.

Little is known about Pytheas. He was a citizen of Massalia, a Greek colony in what is now Marseilles in southern France, and it is uncertain whether he was a merchant or simply a gentleman scientist. The Greco-Roman historian Polybius referred to him as a "private citizen" and a "poor man." But, whatever his economic or social status, Pytheas was a skilled navigator and keen observer.

"We can judge from his writings that Pytheas had a scientific education," Barry Cunliffe told Live Science. Cunliffe is an emeritus professor of European archaeology at the University of Oxford and author of "The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek" (Walker & Company, 2002).

Pytheas made a series of astronomical calculations of latitude during this journey with a device called a gnomon, which was an instrument similar to a modern-day sundial. He accurately estimated the circumference of the British Isles — that is, the distance around the islands of what is now Great Britain and Ireland — placing it at approximately 4,000 miles (6,400 km), according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is not known whether he produced a map from his endeavors, though the first century A.D. Greek geographer Ptolemy, who later made a map of the British Isles, may have used Pytheas' measurements and descriptions.  

An illustration depicting Pytheas, a Greek explorer who is the first known person to write about the British Isles.

Most historians believe that Pytheas sailed from Massalia through the Straits of Gibraltar (then known as the Pillars of Hercules) aboard a trading ship and cruised north along the western coasts of what is now Portugal, Spain and France, according to Cunliffe. (Cunliffe, however, believes Pytheas went overland across France and used local Celtic boats for all water crossings.) Next, Pytheas crossed the English Channel and made landfall in what is modern-day Cornwall, where he described the flourishing trade of tin, an important commodity that was alloyed with copper to make bronze.

Pytheas continued north along the west coasts of what are now England, Wales and Scotland, where he described the area's inhabitants, a Celtic-speaking people he called the "Pretanni," or the "painted ones" in the ancient Celtic language, from which the word Britain is derived, according to Cunliffe.

From Scotland, some scholars have argued that Pytheas left Britain and ventured into the North Sea, eventually encountering a landmass he called Thule, which some have identified as Iceland, though others believe it refers to Norway.

"There is no hard archaeological evidence that Pytheas reached Iceland," Cunliffe said, "but it's not impossible."

Pytheas wrote "On the Ocean" once he returned to Massalia. Until the writings of Tacitus and Julius Caesar some 300 years later, "On the Ocean" was likely the only source of information about Britain and the northern latitudes for most of the world, Cunliffe told Live Science. There were likely copies of Pytheas's work in the great libraries of Pergamum in what is now Turkey; Rhodes, Greece; and Alexandria, Egypt.

Unfortunately, "On the Ocean" has not survived. Only fragments of it remain, paraphrased or excerpted in the writings of other classical writers such as Strabo, Polybius, Timaeus, Eratosthenes, Diodorus Siculus and Pliny the Elder. But the fragments we have are significant, Cunliffe said, as they contain a multitude of astronomical, geographic, biological, oceanographic and ethnological observations that have considerable scientific and anthropological significance.

"If we're right about the kind of person Pytheas was — with his razor-sharp, inquiring mind — he would want to communicate all this new knowledge," Cunliffe said. "He opened up people's minds to the size of the world."

https://www.livescience.com/first-western-description-british-isles

Most lies are told by a few 'superliars' and the rest of people are fairly honest, finds study analysing 116,000 fibs told by 632 students over 91 days

From little white lies to whoppers, it’s long been claimed that people on average tell two fibs a day. But according to a new study, most untruths are told by a few ‘super-liars’ and the rest of us are in fact fairly honest.

Social scientists trying to uncover the truth about lying analysed 116,336 fibs told by 632 undergraduates at a US university over a period of 91 days.

The academics discovered that most of the fibs were told by ‘a few prolific liars’ – while also concluding that only one person in a hundred never told a lie.

The authors, who were led by communication expert Kim Serota at Oakland University, added: ‘Most participants lied infrequently and most lies were told by a few prolific liars.’

They added: ‘Most people report telling few or no lies on a given day.

‘Over the past decade, the skewed distribution of lie prevalence has emerged as an exceptionally robust phenomenon.

‘The current understanding is that prolific liars are distinct and potentially identifiable people with particular characteristics that manifest through consistently telling an unusually large number of lies relative to the majority of people.’

Their analysis discovered that 75 per cent of those in the study were classed as ‘low-frequency’ liars. They also found that 90 per cent of all untruths were little white lies.

Dr Serota, whose study was published in the journal Communication Monographs, said: ‘Above all, findings from the current study document that for most people lying is less prevalent than often believed.’

He added that his work could have implications for research seeking to link lie behaviour with specific personality traits or demographic characteristics.

Dr Serota accepted that the study produced ‘inconsistent findings and has had limited success predicting who will lie’.

Analysing the difficulty of identifying liars, he said: ‘On any given day, a person’s behaviour may reflect either their dispositions or their situational good or bad lie days or both… future research needs to further unpack the interplay of individual differences, situational features, and specific deception motives.

‘Presumably, individual differences such as demographics, occupation, and personality lead people to experience different situations where the truth will be more or less consistent with communication goals.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10099793/Most-lies-told-superliars-rest-people-fairly-honest-finds-study.html

Snake oil was used as traditional medicine throughout history. How did it get such a bad name?


Since the pandemic began, there's been talk of numerous dubious cure-alls for COVID-19.

President Trump spruiked the malaria treatment hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus, even though the World Health Organization says that clinical trials show it doesn't prevent illness or death.

And earlier this year, US TV pastor Jim Bakker was ordered to pay restitution for selling a health supplement that he falsely claimed could cure COVID-19.

Historically, dodgy remedies have been dubbed 'snake oil' and those that push them 'snake oil salesmen'.

But what are the origins of snake oil and how did selling it get such a bad name?

Healing benefits

According to Dr Caitjan Gainty, who lectures on the history of science, technology and medicine at London's King's College, snake oil was sold throughout America in the 18th and 19th century.

"Snake oil was regarded as something that was a very effective cure for a lot of different kinds of things, especially for things like rheumatism and arthritis," Dr Gainty tells ABC RN's Sunday Extra.

Some advertisements went a step further and claimed it could cure a sore throat, catarrh, hay fever, cramps and even deafness.

"Whether or not it helped in every case isn't totally clear," she says.

"But certainly, in the cases of arthritis, it seems like it did make a difference."

Snake oil has always had exotic origins, Dr Gainty says.

"Some people would say: 'This is from an African Voodoo doctor that I met or this is from a Native American or this is secured from China and brought here by the Chinese migrants who are working on the railroad'," she says.

It was used medicinally in many different cultures because of the benefits from the omega-3 fatty acids found in the flesh of certain snakes, particularly the water snake in China. This could have been why it seemed to help with ailments such as arthritis.

"But whatever the origins, the idea was that snake oil in this form was actually helpful and curative."

In the 19th century, the American pioneers, who'd likely heard about the reputed healing benefits of snake oil, would capture many of the native rattlesnakes and sent them off to be turned into oil in the hope of making some extra money, Dr Gainty explains.

Snake oil was also cheaper than other available medicines at the time. So when unorthodox medical practitioners started selling it on the travelling medicine show circuits, the public was open to trying it.

"These traveling entertaining events would move from town to town," Dr Gainty says.

"You would get great entertainers like Harry Houdini and lots of bluegrass and country music people playing. And you'd also get these people who were selling their snake oil."

What's in it?
Initially the product was what it claimed to be — namely actual snake oil. But over the years, it became unclear exactly what was in these remedies.

That was until the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act came into force and investigators began taking a closer look.

It turned out that snake oil wasn't as authentic as it was purported to be.

Dr Gainty said there was a classic example at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

"This snake oil salesman Clark Stanley boiled up some snakes on the spot and then sort of skimmed [the oil] off and put it in bottles and said 'Here is your snake oil'," she says.

"They said, 'This is red pepper and camphor — that's not snake oil. This is a problem'," she adds.

The legislation went even further. Manufacturers were required to label their products if ingredients such as alcohol, opium, morphine, heroin, cannabis indica, chloral hydrate were present.

The Vandals sacked Rome, but do they deserve their reputation?

Their name is synonymous with destruction, but the group may not deserve such a harsh legacy.

Over the centuries, their name became so interchangeable with destruction that it became its synonym. But it turns out the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that managed to take over Rome in 455, may not deserve that connotation.

The first known written reference to the tribe was in A.D. 77, when Pliny the Elder mentioned “Vandilii.” However, the Vandals’ roots are uncertain, and their early history is contested. They are thought to have migrated into what is now Germany from Scandinavia. They may also have included members of the Przeworsk culture, an Iron Age culture that lived in what is now Poland. Historians think they were farmers and cattle herders.

During the 2nd century A.D., the Vandals began clashing with the Roman Empire. They participated in multiple wars along the Roman frontier, including the Marcommanic Wars along the Danube River, which raged from the 160s A.D. through 180.

A people on the move

A more significant migration toward Rome occurred when the Huns pushed “barbarian” tribes, including the Vandals, south and west into the Roman Empire beginning in the 370s A.D. During this time, the Vandals adopted Christianity, espousing Arianism. This belief that Christ was not equal to God put them in conflict with the Church.

As they traveled, the Vandals duked it out with the locals, capturing territory as they went. In 406 A.D., they crossed the Rhine River, pouring into first Gaul, then what is now Spain, then northern Africa. They captured Carthage (in what is now Tunisia) in 439 A.D.

Gaiseric (also known as Genseric), the Vandals’ king, made Carthage the Vandals’ capital, and conquered more and more Roman territory as the years went on. Carthage’s strategic location on the Mediterranean gave the Vandals an advantage, and they became a formidable naval power. “If the Romans ever attempted a naval assault on [Gaiseric’s] realm in North Africa,” writes historian Thomas J. Craughwell, “the Vandal fleet in the Mediterranean could intercept the Roman ships before they came anywhere near Carthage.”

Desperate, the Roman Empire recognized the Vandals and made a treaty that ensured they would leave Rome itself alone. The Vandals adopted many facets of Roman culture, including its dress and arts.

But the Vandal king was a shrewd observer of Rome’s disintegrating empire. In 455 he saw his opening when Petronius Maximus murdered the current Roman Emperor, Valentinian III. Gaiseric declared the Vandals’ treaty with Rome invalid and marched on Rome.

The sack of the Roman capital made history books, but was not the violent event many assume. Though the Vandals were considered heretics by the early Church, they negotiated with Pope Leo I, who convinced them not to destroy Rome. They raided the city’s wealth, but left the buildings intact and went home.

Years of clashes followed. Between 460 and 475 A.D., the Vandals successfully repelled a Rome now intent on taking back what it had lost. But Gaiseric’s death sounded the death knell for the Vandals. In 533, the Romans took back North Africa, expelling the Vandals for good.

Their kingdom had ended, but their legacy never did. To this day, “vandal” is associated—perhaps unfairly—with the group’s successful sack of Rome.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/vandals-sacked-rome-deserve-reputation

Scientists solve the mystery of the Etruscans' origins

A new genetic analysis may have finally revealed the origin of the Etruscans — a mysterious people whose civilization thrived in Italy centuries before the founding of Rome.

It turns out the enigmatic Etruscans were local to the area, with nearly identical genetics to their Latin-speaking neighbors.

This finding contradicts earlier theories that the Etruscans — who for centuries spoke a now extinct, non-Indo-European language that was remarkably different from others in the region — came from somewhere different from their Latin-speaking neighbors.

Instead, both groups appear to be migrants from the Pontic-Caspian steppe — a long, thin swath of land stretching from the north Black Sea around Ukraine to the north Caspian Sea in Russia. After arriving in Italy during the Bronze age, the early speakers of Etruscan put down roots, assimilating speakers of other languages to their own culture as they flourished into a great civilization.

The finding "challenges simple assumptions that genes equal languages and suggests a more complex scenario that may have involved the assimilation of early Italic speakers by the Etruscan speech community," David Caramelli, an anthropology professor at the University of Florence, said in a statement.  

With cities as sophisticated as those of the ancient Greeks; trade networks as lucrative as the Phoenicians’; and a vast wealth to rival ancient Egypt’s, the Etruscan civilization, the first known superpower of the Western Mediterranean, had a brilliance matched only by the mystery surrounding its language and its origins. Rising to the height of its power in central Italy in the 7th century B.C., Etruria dominated the region for centuries until the advent of the Roman republic, which had all but conquered the Etruscans before the middle of the 3rd century B.C., fully assimilating them by 90 B.C.

Archaeologists have long known that the Etruscans had bequeathed to the later Roman Republic their religious rituals, metalworking, gladiatorial combat and the innovations in architecture and engineering, which transformed Rome from a once crude settlement into a great city. However, not much was known about the geographical origins of the Etruscans or their enigmatic, partially-understood language — making them the subject of more than 2,400 years of intense debate.

The ancient Greek writer Herodotus (widely considered to be the first historian) believed that the Etruscans descended from Anatolian and Aegean peoples who fled westward following a famine in what is now western Turkey. Another Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, countered that the pre-Roman civilization, despite their Greek customs and non-Indo-European language, were natives of the Italian peninsula. 

While recent archaeological evidence, which shows little evidence of migration, has been tilting in favor of Halicarnassus’ argument, "a lack of ancient DNA from the region has made genetic investigations inconsistent," the study researchers said in the statement. To resolve this, the scientists collected ancient genomic information from the remains of 82 individuals who lived between 2,800 and 1,000 years ago across 12 archaeological sites in central and southern Italy.

After comparing DNA from those 82 individuals with that of other ancient and modern peoples, the scientists discovered that despite the strong differences in customs and language, the Etruscans and their Latin neighbors shared a genetic profile with each other. In fact, the ancestry of both groups points to people who first arrived in the region from the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the Bronze Age. After these early Etruscans settled in northern and eastern Italy, their gene pool remained relatively stable — across both the Iron Age and the absorption of the Etruscan civilization into the Roman Republic. Then after the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a great influx of new genes, likely as a result of the mass migrations the empire brought about. 

"This genetic shift clearly depicts the role of the Roman Empire in the large-scale displacement of people in a time of enhanced upward or downward socioeconomic and geographic mobility," Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropologyin Germany, said in the statement.

Now that the ancient debate could have finally been settled, the scientists plan to conduct a broader genetic study using ancient DNA from other regions of the Roman Empire. This will help them to not only pin down further details of the origins of the Etruscans and their strange, now extinct, language, but to discover the movements of peoples that transformed their descendants into the genetically diverse citizens of a global superpower.

The researchers published their findings Sept. 24 in the journal Science Advances.