Advice to keep things in perspective. In a video format. Ten tips for you.
Quotes for Our Enduring COVID-19
Simple tips to be more happy.
Category: Living Well
Our Eyes as a Window to Our Age
New eye scanner provides helpful insights.
As Norbert Juma observes for Everyday Power, “Eyes are the windows to the soul. They don’t lie. They show the truth, no matter what face you put on. Just like body language, our eyes say more than we ever could with words.” Today, we look at (pun intended 🙂 ) our eyes as a window to our age.
New Technology Shows Our Eyes as a Window to Our Age
Recently, researchers from Boston University College of Engineering and School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Washington, Seattle published an important article on this topic.
Click the image to access that article. Then read the highlights below. And watch the video clip.
According to the Boston College School of Medicine:
People often say that eyes are windows to the soul. It appears they may also be windows to human aging.
All people age, but individuals age at different rates, some faster and others slower. Yet, we know of no universally accepted measure of biological aging. Numerous aging-related metrics have been proposed and tested. But no marker to date identifies aging. And no noninvasive method accurately measures and tracks biological aging in individuals. In what we believe to be the first study of its kind, our researchers discovered that a specialized eye scanner accurately measures signals from proteins in lens of the eye. To detect and track biological aging in living humans.
The lens contains proteins that accumulate aging-related changes throughout life. These lens proteins provide a permanent record of each person’s life history of aging. Our eye scanner decodes this record of how a person is aging at the molecular level.
Reopening and the Disabled
Risks and rewards of COVID-19 behavior for the disabled.
A while back, during more normal times, we looked at travel and the disabled. Now, we look at reopening and the disabled. As difficult as it may be for the rest of us, it is far tougher for those with disabilities.
COVID-19 Reopening and the Disabled
For insights on this important topic, we refer to Andrew Pulrang’s article in Forbes:
People with disabilities and chronic illnesses generally tend to side with caution. For various practical reasons, they are at higher risk of getting infected. And if infected, we are far more likely to get much sicker and die from COVID-19.
So most of us probably do tend to favor more precautions and longer restrictions aimed at curbing and stamping out the pandemic. Being part of the probable collateral damage of premature ‘reopening’ makes this all so much more concrete and immediate for disabled people.
On the other hand, disabled people exhibit some affinity for the risk takers. In most situations, disabled people tend to greater willingness to take risks, not less. Otherwise, we would never accomplish anything. We understand quite intimately what it means to weigh the risks and benefits that always come with freedom and opportunity.
Recognizing, rethinking, and adjusting to risk is in many ways the core of the disability rights movement and disability culture. This is especially true for assertive advocate sand disability rights activists. The right to take risks, often phrased as “the dignity of risk,” is very important to disabled people individually, and to the disability community as a whole.
We cherish this right to take risks all the more because most disabled people at some point in our lives have to contend with some kind of outside authority either informally or formally telling us what we can and cannot do, simply because of our disabilities.
To read more, click the image.
