RaMbLeS
Welcome to RaMbLeS, a collection of weekly musings on life and Scripture. It all began in 2005 on Google’s blogspot as the aBeLOG (a name now recycled), a semi-autobiographical devotional that attempted to keep well-wishers abreast of my activities as I relocated to Scotland for a few years. Since my return, I’ve continued my RaMbLeS, and here’s its most recent incarnation on Homiletix, as random reflections usually based on current news articles and travel experiences and whatever else takes my fancy!
Hasslers!
Difficult people in your life? Happens to everybody. But it’s more than just our moods that are affected, apparently. They can age you!
So report sociologists from New York University, University of South Florida, and University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Negative Social Ties as Emerging Risk Factors for Accelerated Aging, Inflammation, and Multimorbidity.”
We investigate the role of ‘hasslers,’ people in one’s
Fats!
Spare tire in the midsection? Not good. And not just cosmetically. Might affect your brain. Even if your weight is acceptable.
So claimed a recent article in the prestigious journal Nature recently: “Sustained Visceral Fat Loss is Associated with Attenuated Brain Atrophy and Improved Cognitive Function in Late Midlife,” by researchers from Israel, Germany, and the USA.
In other words, it might not be how much fat we carry, but where we carry it.
A large, long-running,
Pothole!
Earlier this year, a miracle happened.
Vineeta Shukla, 50, of Bareilly, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, who had collapsed in her home, had subsequently been declared “brain dead” by doctors in a local hospital. So she was being transported back home in an ambulance with her husband, Kumar, who said:
I was preparing for her funeral. I told my family to prepare for her last rites. She was not breathing, there was only a sinking heartbeat. And medical professionals
Chocolate?
Chocolate is good for you. Saith scientists. Again!
This time, in “Astringent Flavanol Fires the Locus-Noradrenergic System, Regulating Neurobehavior and Autonomic Nerves,” published Current Research in Food Science, published recently by scientists from Japan and Italy.
You’re right, it didn’t say anything about chocolate directly.
You see, astringency, is a stimulant property—almost a bitterness of sorts—unique to only a few compounds, typical ones being the
Diagnosis?
That is the African Giant Pouched Rat (aka Cricetomys gambianus). An incredible rodent: it has been trained to smell out land mines in some parts of Africa. But here’s a new one: it is now capable of smelling out tuberculosis, too. We have, in short, a better diagnostician. Take that, doctors! A lab rat has done us better!
Every weekday, this trained rodent, named Tariq, and eight of his brethren take turns in a cage at Eduardo Mondlane University’s College of Veterinary
Swallowed?
A TikToker in Mexico thought her cough that wouldn’t go away was just a reaction to the changing weather. It wasn’t.
Instead, it was her own nose ring, lodged deep within her lungs.
The 26-year-old, Monica Deyanira Cabrera Barajas, recently went viral on TikTok, amassing 4.7 million views after revealing the freak medical accident.
Deyanira, who has a large number of piercings, didn’t initially notice the jewelry was missing. It wasn’t until she developed a chronic
Bixonimania?
Sounds like a disease, right? It is.
But it is not!
If you consulted “Dr. Google” (or any other chatbot) and entered “sore, itch, red eyes”, this is the answer you’d get: “Diagnosis: bixonimania.”
This condition doesn’t show up in medical literature. Because it doesn’t exist.
The prestigious science journal, Nature, did a news feature on this oddity.
Bixonimania was invented by a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg,
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. 