Music-making
Hundreds of millions of us engage with music each day.
Writes Daniel Bowling, Director of the Music and Brain Health Lab at Stanford School of Medicine, in Translational Psychiatry:
As far as we know, music has been with humans since our earliest existence. The first known evidence of human preoccupation with music comes from Stone Age flutes, carefully carved in wing bones and mammoth ivory some 40,000 years ago.”
In the modern day, these values that we place on music
Deaf?
Our ears are connected to our hearts? Maybe, say scientists from Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong (China) in “Hearing Impairment, Psychological Distress, and Incident Heart Failure,” published in Heart recently.
Hearing loss raises the risk of heart failure by nearly a third, they assert. Apparently vascular problems may be affecting both ear and heart:
The rich distribution of capillaries in the cochlea and the high metabolic demand of the inner ear
Birds!
Crows can do geometry! Yup!
Claimeth scientists from the Institute of Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, in Science Advances: “Crows Recognize Geometric Regularity.” These intelligent avians can look at a handful of four-sided shapes and correctly distinguish those that exhibit geometric regularity from those that don’t, they say.
Crows were trained to detect a visually distinct intruder shape among six concurrent arbitrary shapes. The crows were able to immediately
Mouth!
Our mouths are connected to our hearts? Yup!
A growing body of research reveals a significant link between poor dental hygiene and cardiovascular disease. Gum disease and oral infections can trigger inflammation, allow harmful bacteria into the bloodstream, and, in severe cases, even lead to direct infection of heart tissue. Together, these effects can contribute to serious, sometimes life-threatening, cardiovascular conditions.
Said BioMed Central: Oral Health
Tough Question: Genesis 22
Here’s an “Answer to a Tough Question” that I did for The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary the other day: Why did God command Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? (On Genesis 22.)
[If you want to dig into the details, go here.]
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.