HEALTHY living

Here’s to a better life for all.

STEADY BEAT

If you’re healthy, one piece of standard advice for getting even healthier is to make sure you do at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity a week. But what counts as moderate? It’s when your heart beats at 50–70% of the rate it can manage, and that depends on your age. Work out your max: subtract your age from 220. So if you’re 50, don’t go above 170 beats a minute. Moderate exercise means your heart is thumping at 85 beats a minute, minimum.

All a bit fiddly faddly? The Mayo Clinic says that if you think you’re exerting yourself, you actually are. But it also mentions these physical signs: your breathing quickens, but you’re not out of breath, and you get a little sweaty after about 10 minutes. And this one, which seems a little impractical: you can chat, but you can’t sing. Who’s going to put that to the test at the gym?

THE GREATEST THREAT TO HUMANITY

Is it someone’s finger on the nuclear button? (Actually, there’s no button; there’s a card called the biscuit, with the codes on it.) Is it climate change? Is it an asteroid strike? Robots gone rogue? Water scarcity? Food shortages? Okay, let’s round off the gloom list with an equally gloomy possibility: US microbiologist Lance Price says superbugs – bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics – are right up there with the worst of them. ‘I rank it with climate change; I definitely rank it way ahead of terrorism,’ he says. There is something you can do about this one: don’t reach for antibiotics unnecessarily.

THAT’S A BIT RICH

We can tell whether someone is rich or poor just by looking at their face, say psychology researchers at the University of Toronto. But it has to be when their expression is neutral. Rather alarmingly for any hopes of social equality, they also found that we judge the ‘rich’ faces more likely to land a job. Keep smiling?