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!
Ice-Cream!
Danielle Wiener-Bronner of CNN pronounced the other day:
America’s age-old love affair with ice cream appears to be winding down.”
Apparently the consumption of ice cream (not including froyo, sherbet, or even non-/low-fat varieties of the good stuff) has been falling for years.
In 1986, the average American ate 18 pounds of regular ice cream, according to the US Department of Agriculture. By 2021, the most recent year of the data, that was down a third to just 12 pounds
Painless?
Jo Cameron is a 74-year-old mother of two from Scotland. She is only one of two known people in the world who carry a unique gene. And what does that do? She feels no anxiety, fear, or pain! Congenital analgesia, it is called!
Read all about it in “Microdeletion in a FAAH Pseudogene Identified in a Patient with High Anandamide Concentrations and Pain Insensitivity,” published a few years ago by researchers from University College London in the British Journal of
Grumpy?
There are advantages to being in a bad mood, apparently. So saith researchers from the University of Arizona, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Utrecht University (the last two in the Netherlands), in “Negative Affect Increases Reanalysis of Conflicts Between Discourse Context and World Knowledge” published the other day in Frontiers in Communication.
Said Dr. Vicky Lai, lead author:
Mood and language seem to be supported by different brain networks. But
Smile!
The New York Times reported on an interesting tidbit recently.
About six years ago, Keiko Kawano, a radio host, found that when she stopped doing voice-articulation exercises, her smile began to fade. At a certain point, she struggled to lift the corners of her mouth. So Ms. Kawano, then 43, decided to learn how facial muscles work. After using the knowledge to reanimate her smile, she started helping others do the same under the motto, “More smile, more happiness.”
Apparently,
Fraud!
Over 25 percent of studies published in medical journals are fraudulent! So claims a group of researchers from the University of Magdeburg and the Max-Planck Institute in Germany, in “Fake Publications in Biomedical Science: Red-flagging Method Indicates Mass Production,” published as a preprint in medRxiv last month.
Using a simple, automated detection system the researchers looked for two telltale signs: Whether an author was registered with a personal, rather than
Electricity!
The Washington Post reported on an interesting story last month. About “Kosher Electricity.”
What on earth?
Here’s the problem Kosher Electricity is trying to solve. The ultra-Orthodox, the Haredim, constitute about 14 percent of Israel’s 9.5 million people. According to their rabbinical rules, it is not kosher to plug into the national grid to draw electricity from the national grid during Shabbat hours, from sundown on Fridays to sundown on Saturdays.
The strictest
Intestines!
There are, I’m sure you know, despite all the hullabaloo in society these days, differences between males and females. Besides the obvious, I want us to acknowledge another difference.
As reported by a group of researchers from North Carolina State University, Duke, and University of Minnesota. “Hidden Diversity: Comparative Functional Morphology of Humans and Other Species,” published in PeerJ.
The long and short of it (pun intended, but you won’t catch it till
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.