The BBC news website tonight reported a disturbing new study, where Swedish researchers have shown that being single in middle age contributes to an increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
I’m generally pretty sceptical about any story that could start “researchers have shown…”, as researchers have shown a lot of things down the years that have turned out to be scaremongering. Filtering out other possible factors must be very difficult. Although at first glance the sample size is a reasonable 1449, only 139 of those people actually suffered cognitive impairment of some kind, so that’s the real sample size. Still, they claim there was a definite correlation even allowing for other factors.
I suppose it’s something else to look forward to. Now only one question - where the hell am I?!
|
Yesterday I was at the Museum of Science and Industry (MoSI) in Manchester, taking part in their “Meet the Scientist” session, along with some colleagues from the university. What this meant in practice was that I made batches of popcorn almost constantly for five hours, with seemingly the entire populations of north west England, France, Italy, Spain and at least part of Australasia turning up. I think everyone enjoyed it though, and that’s the main thing.
Afterwards we visited the Body Worlds 4 exhibition, presented by Dr Gunther von Hagens. This exhibit has drawn some attention from the media because of its somewhat unusual contents, that is, preserved human corpses, dissected to varying degrees. This isn’t as grim as it sounds, as these photos on the BBC Manchester website show. I found it extremely interesting, as the preservation technique, called plastination, allowed the skeleton, muscles, organs, nerves and so on to be presented in amazing detail. It really gave me a better appreciation of what I’ve got lurking inside, better than any textbook or TV show could achieve.
As you can imagine, religious groups aren’t overly impressed by this exhibit and one section that has proved more controversial than the others is that showing a number of human foetuses at different stages of development. However, I think they’ve got it all wrong. As a practising Catholic I’m naturally opposed to abortion, but I defy anyone to look at that exhibition and still be “pro-choice”, as it is put. I didn’t actually know what the legal limit was for abortion currently, so I looked it up when I got home and was amazed to discover it is 24 weeks. There was one foetus which was at about 19 weeks and as far as I could tell it was a baby - just smaller than the full term version. Even the little blobs that had only made it to about 9 weeks were still clearly baby shaped.
Anyway, I’d certainly recommend anyone to go along and see it (take a tenner or so with you for entry…) and make your own mind up.
|
| 
| 
| 
| Trackback |
Permalink (pingbacks enabled) | No Comments »