What the scientists are saying…
Life may flash before our eyes
Brain scans of a man’s final moments have offered tantalising evidence that our lives may indeed flash before our eyes as we die. The scans were those of an 87-year-old epilepsy patient in Canada, who’d happened to have a fatal heart attack while linked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG). Researchers compared the scans from 30 seconds before his heart stopped to those immediately after, and noted that at the point of death there had been a surge in activity in parts of the brain associated with memory, concentration and dreaming. “Surprisingly, after the heart stops pumping blood into the brain, these oscillations keep going,” said study author Dr Ajmal Zemmar. “Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.” The team warned, however, that establishing whether these apparent “last recall” moments are commonplace will be hard, as it is rare for people to die while having an EEG.
Lift weights to live longer...
Half an hour of muscle strengthening activity a week could cut the risk of dying from any cause by as much as a fifth, a meta-analysis has found. A team in Japan examined more than a dozen studies into the link between muscle-strengthening activities (including weight-lifting and squats) and the health outcomes of adults with no severe pre-existing conditions. The participants ranged between 18 and 97 and the longest of the studies had lasted 25 years. This analysis revealed that doing between 30 and 60 minutes of muscle strengthening per week was linked to a 10-17% reduced risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and lung cancer. But no such risk reduction was picked up for other cancers (including kidney and bowel), and “no conclusive evidence” was found that doing more than an hour of muscle training every week cut the risk of dying further still.
...and eat earlier to lose weight
Intermittent fasting has become a popular weight-loss method in recent years, thanks in part to the hype surrounding the 5:2 diet, which involves eating what you like for five days and almost nothing for two. Now, research in Nature Communications has suggested that people who are fasting will lose more weight if they cut out food later in the day. For the research, 90 volunteers with a normal weight were split into three groups; those in the first group were told only to eat between 6am and 3pm; the second only between 11am and 8pm; the third ate whenever they felt like it. While fasting, participants were only allowed to drink water, flavoured carbonated water, tea without sugar and coffee. After five weeks, those who’d stopped eating at 3pm had lost 3.5lb, having consumed 240 fewer calories per day, on average, than the control group, while those eating between 11am and 8pm group had only cut their intake by 159 calories and had lost just 0.45lb. Blood tests at the start and end of the study also showed that the early group were left with better insulin sensitivity, increased gut microbial diversity and ameliorated inflammation, while those eating later saw no such improvements.
The black hole that wasn’t
There was considerable excitement two years ago when astronomers said they’d identified a black hole, orbited by two stars, on our cosmic doorstep. At 1,000 light years away, it was chalked up as the closest to Earth ever found. But its very existence was soon contested by other astronomers, who then teamed up with the authors of the original study to decide the matter. Now, they have all agreed that the black hole doesn’t exist, but is in fact two stars locked in a “vampire” embrace in which one star has stripped the other of its mass. The researchers were partly convinced that the first study was wrong by data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, which showed that the two stars were too close together for a black hole to be there too. But Dietrich Baade, an author of both the old paper and the new one, said the result was not a disappointment. “The stripped star is even more exciting than the black hole because it was caught in a phase that lasts only a very small fraction of the total lifetime of the system,” he explained.