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!
Attention!
“What is happening to kids’ brains?” asked a Wall Street Journal article recently. Most kids apparently can’t sit through feature-length films and have trouble focusing on homework or reading a book.
Dr. Carl Marci, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston:
Puppy?
Dog faces have apparently evolved over tens of thousands of years. Well, what’s so strange about that, you ask?
Here’s the answer from scientists from the University of Portsmouth, UK, and from Howard University, NC State, and Duquesne in the US. In “Evolution of Facial Muscle Anatomy in Dogs,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dogs were shaped during the course of domestication both in their behavior and in their anatomical features.
Headache?
If you thought you were the only one getting more headaches these days, you’d be mistaken. No, you’re not alone. Apparently more than half the entire global population is suffering from some form of headache disorder.
So proclaimeth scientists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, and Imperial College London, London, in “The Global Prevalence of Headache: An Update, with Analysis of the Influences of Methodological Factors on
Living!
The Arctic rotifer is a strange creature. It is pretty small—less than a millimeter or 0.0393701 inches! So, basically, it is microscopic. Yet, its body is complex: it is multicellular, and it has a gut and a brain. This critter, belongs to a group of rotifers known as Bdelloids, that are known for their ability to survive
extremely low temperatures. Previously, it was known that they could live for up to a decade when frozen at about −20°C.
Well, they found a few
Immunized?
The other day, the German news agency, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa), reported on a strange item.
On Sunday, the country’s disease control agency reported 74,053 new COVID-19 infections, less than from a week ago, when the Robert Koch Institute registered 11,224 daily infections. Experts think the most recent surge of infections in Germany—triggered by the BA.2 omicron subvariant—have peaked. With the fall of infection rates, many measures to reign in the pandemic
Nostalgia!
Are you suffering from general aches and pains? Stressed? Grieved?
There is a solution to all your woes: get nostalgic!
Chinese scientists say that taking a break to stroll down memory lane really does relieve those pangs, pins, and pinches. So say they, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in “Thalamocortical Mechanisms for Nostalgia-Induced Analgesia,” published recently in The Journal of Neuroscience.
Apparently what happens is that feeling nostalgic makes you overcome
Zzzzz!
Yup, that’s all you need to do. Get some zzzzz’s and you lose weight! Dozing to be fit. My kinda health strategy!
Anyway, what I’d suspected to be true all along has now formally be proven by scientists at The University of Chicago and University of Wisconsin–Madison in “Effect of Sleep Extension on Objectively Assessed Energy Intake Among Adults With Overweight in Real-life Settings: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” published in the prestigious Journal of
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.