What you need to do to be considered "cool".
What do David Bowie, Stevie Nicks, Keanu Reeves have in common? They are - by almost anyone's standards - "cool". A new psychology study has been making the rounds, and it tries to get to the bottom of a simple question: What does it mean to be a cool person? The authors widdled the answer down to six specific traits. Caleb Warren is a professor at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, and one of the authors behind this study, he chats to Jesse.
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Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell dead at 97
By Will Dunham , Reuters Jim Lovell commanded Apollo 13, the only Apollo mission scheduled to land on the Moon which did not. Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images American astronaut Jim Lovell, commander of the failed 1970 mission to the moon that nearly ended in disaster but became an inspirational saga of survival and the basis for the hit movie Apollo 13 , has died at the age of 97, NASA said on Friday (US time). Hollywood superstar Tom Hanks played Lovell in director Ron Howard's acclaimed 1995 film. It recounted NASA's Apollo 13 mission, which was planned as humankind's third lunar landing but went horribly wrong when an onboard explosion on the way to the moon put the lives of the three astronauts in grave danger. Lovell and crew mates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise endured frigid, cramped conditions, dehydration and hunger for three-and-a-half days while concocting with Mission Control in Houston ingenious solutions to bring the crippled spacecraft safely back to Earth. "A 'successful failure' describes exactly what [Apollo] 13 was - because it was a failure in its initial mission - nothing had really been accomplished," Lovell told Reuters in 2010 in an interview marking the 40th anniversary of the flight. The outcome, the former Navy test pilot said, was "a great success in the ability of people to take an almost-certain catastrophe and turn it into a successful recovery". The Apollo 13 mission came nine months after Neil Armstrong had become the first person to walk on the moon when he took "one giant leap for mankind" during the Apollo 11 mission on 20 July, 1969. There was drama even before Apollo 13's launch on 11 April, 1970. Days earlier, the backup lunar module pilot inadvertently exposed the crew to German measles but Lovell and Haise were immune to it. Ken Mattingly, the command module pilot, had no immunity to measles and was replaced at the last minute by rookie astronaut Swigert. The mission generally went smoothly for its first two days. But moments after the crew finished a TV broadcast showing how they lived in space, an exposed wire in a command module oxygen tank sparked an explosion that badly damaged the spacecraft 320,000km from Earth. The accident not only ruined their chances of landing on the moon but imperiled their lives. "Suddenly there's a 'hiss-bang. And the spacecraft rocks back and forth,'" Lovell said in a 1999 NASA oral history interview. "The lights come on and jets fire. And I looked at Haise to see if he knew what caused it. He had no idea. Looked at Jack Swigert. He had no idea. And then, of course, things started to happen." A group of eight astronauts and flight controllers monitor the console activity in the Mission Operations Control Room during the Apollo 13 lunar landing mission in this 14 April 1970 file photo. Photo: HO / NASA / AFP Swigert saw a warning light and told Mission Control: "Houston, we've had a problem here". In the movie, the line is instead attributed to Lovell and famously delivered by Hanks - slightly reworded - as: "Houston, we have a problem." With a dangerous loss of power, the three astronauts abandoned the command module and went to the lunar module - designed for two men to land on the moon. They used it as a lifeboat for a harrowing three-and-a-half day return to Earth. The astronauts and the US space agency experts in Houston scrambled to figure out how to get the crew safely home with a limited amount of equipment at their disposal. Electrical systems were turned off to save energy, sending temperatures plummeting to near freezing. Water was drastically rationed, food was short and sleep was nearly impossible. The crew had to contrive a filter system to remove high levels of carbon dioxide that could have proven deadly. "The thought crossed our mind that we were in deep trouble. But we never dwelled on it," Lovell said in the NASA interview. 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During a telecast to Earth from their spacecraft on Christmas Eve, Lovell and crew mates Frank Borman and William Anders read verses from the Bible's Book of Genesis. Lovell, who later had a moon crater named in his honor, retired as an astronaut in 1973, working first for a harbor towing company and then in telecommunications. He co-authored a 1994 book, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 , that became the basis for Howard's film. Lovell recalled a meeting with Howard in which the director asked the astronaut which actor he would want to play him. "I said, 'Kevin Costner,'" Lovell said. "And Hanks never lets me forget that... But Hanks did a great job." Lovell made a cameo appearance in the film as the commander of the US Navy ship that retrieves the astronauts and shakes hands with Hanks. James Lovell was born in Cleveland on 25 March, 1928. He was just five when his father died and his mother moved the family to Milwaukee. He became interested in space as a teenager. He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1952 and became a test pilot before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 1962. He had four children with his wife, Marilyn. - Reuters
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Scientists say it may be possible to protect ageing brains from Alzheimer's with an old remedy — lithium
By Brenda Goodman , CNN Photo: VICTOR HABBICK VISIONS/SCIENCE P In a major new finding almost a decade in the making, researchers at Harvard Medical School say they've found a key that may unlock many of the mysteries of Alzheimer's disease and brain ageing - the humble metal lithium. Lithium is best known to medicine as a mood stabiliser given to people who have bipolar disorder and depression. It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1970, but it was used by doctors to treat mood disorders for nearly a century beforehand. Now, for the first time, researchers have shown that lithium is naturally present in the body in tiny amounts and that cells require it to function normally - much like vitamin C or iron. It also appears to play a critical role in maintaining brain health. In a series of experiments reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers at Harvard and Rush universities found that depleting lithium in the diet of normal mice caused their brains to develop inflammation and changes associated with accelerated ageing. In mice that were specially bred to develop the same kinds of brain changes as humans with Alzheimer's disease, a low-lithium diet revved the buildup of sticky proteins that form plaques and tangles in the brains that are hallmarks of the disease. It also sped up memory loss. Maintaining normal lithium levels in mice as they aged, however, protected them from brain changes associated with Alzheimer's. If further research supports the findings, it could open the door to new treatments and diagnostic tests for Alzheimer's, which affects an estimated 6.7 million older adults in the United States, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The research provides a unifying theory that helps explain so many of the puzzle pieces scientists have been trying to fit together for decades. "It is a potential candidate for a common mechanism leading to the multisystem degeneration of the brain that precedes dementia," said Dr. Bruce Yankner, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, who led the study. "It will take a lot more science to determine whether this is a common pathway ... or one of several pathways," to Alzheimer's, he added. "The data are very intriguing." In an editorial published in Nature, Dr. Ashley Bush, a neuroscientist who directs the Melbourne Dementia Research Centre at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said the researchers "present compelling evidence that lithium does in fact have a physiological role and that normal ageing might impair the regulation of lithium levels in the brain." He was not involved in the study. Close examination of human and animal brain tissues, along with genetic investigations in the study, found the mechanism that appears to be at play: Beta amyloid plaques - the sticky deposits that gum up the brains of Alzheimer's patients - bind to lithium and hold it, including the type that's normally present in the body, as well as the commonly prescribed form. This binding depletes lithium available for nearby cells, including important scavengers known as microglia. When the brain is healthy and functioning normally, microglia are waste managers, clearing away beta amyloid before it can accumulate and can cause harm. In the team's experiments, microglia from the brains of lithium-deficient mice showed a reduced ability to sweep away and break down beta amyloid. Yankner believes this creates a downward spiral. The accumulation of beta amyloid soaks up more and more lithium, further crippling the brain's ability to clear it away. He and his colleagues tested different lithium compounds and found one - lithium orotate - that doesn't bind to amyloid beta. When they gave lithium orotate to mice with signs of Alzheimer's in their brains, these changes reversed: Beta amyloid plaques and tangles of tau that were choking the memory centres of the brain were reduced. Mice treated with lithium were once again able to navigate mazes and learn to identify new objects, whereas those who got placebos showed no change in their memory and thinking deficits. In its natural form, lithium is an element, a soft, silvery-white metal that readily combines with other elements to form compounds and salts. It's naturally present in the environment, including in food and water. Scientists have never fully known how it works to improve mood - only that it does. The original formula for 7Up soda included lithium - it was called 7Up Lithiated Lemon Soda - and touted as a hangover cure and mood lifter "for hospital or home use." Some hot springs known to contain mineral water brimming with lithium became sought out wellness destinations for their curative powers. Still, people who take prescription doses of lithium - which were much higher than the doses used in the new study - can sometimes develop thyroid or kidney toxicity. Tests of the mice given low doses of lithium orotate showed no signs of damage. That's encouraging, Yankner said, but it doesn't mean people should try to take lithium supplements on their own. "A mouse is not a human. Nobody should take anything based just on mouse studies," Yankner said. "The lithium treatment data we have is in mice, and it needs to be replicated in humans. We need to find the right dose in humans," he added. The normal amounts of lithium in our bodies, and the concentrations given to the mice, are small - about 1000 times lower than doses given to treat bipolar disorder, Yankner notes. Yankner said he hoped toxicity trials of lithium salts would start soon. Neither he nor any of his co-authors have a financial interest in the outcome of the research, he said. The National Institutes of Health was the major funder of the study, along with grants from private foundations. "NIH support was absolutely critical for this work," Yankner said. The new research corroborates earlier studies hinting that lithium might be important for Alzheimer's. A large Danish study published in 2017 found people with higher levels of lithium in their drinking water were less likely to be diagnosed with dementia compared with those whose tap water contained naturally lower lithium levels. Another large study published in 2022 from the United Kingdom found that people prescribed lithium were about half as likely has those in a control group to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, suggesting a protective effect of the drug. But lithium's use in psychiatry caused it to become type cast as therapeutic, Yankner said. No one realized it might be important to the body's normal physiology. That happened in part because the amounts of lithium that typically circulate in the body are so small, they couldn't be quantified until recently. Yankner and his team had to adapt new technology to measure it. In the first stage of the research, the scientists tested the brain tissue and blood of older patients collected by the brain bank at Rush University for trace levels of 27 metals. Some of the patients had no history of memory trouble, while others had early memory decline and pronounced Alzheimer's. While there was no change in the levels of most metals they measured, lithium was an exception. Lithium levels were consistently lower in patients with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's compared to those with normal brain function. The brains of patients Alzheimer's disease also showed increased levels of zinc and decreased levels of copper, something scientists had observed before. Consistently finding lower lithium levels in the brains of people with memory loss amounted to a smoking gun, Yankner said. "At first, frankly, we were sceptical of the result because it wasn't expected," said Yankner. But it held up even when they checked samples from other brain banks at Massachusetts General Hospital, Duke and Washington universities. "We wanted to know whether this drop in lithium was biologically meaningful, so we devised an experimental protocol where we could take lithium selectively out of the diet of mice and see what happens," Yankner said. When they fed the mice a low-lithium diet, simply dropping their natural levels by 50 percent, their brains rapidly developed features of Alzheimer's. "The neurons started to degenerate. The immune cells in the brain went wild in terms of increased inflammation and worse maintenance function of the neurons around them, and it looked more like an advanced Alzheimer patient," Yankner said. The team also found the gene expression profiles of lithium-deficient mice and people who had Alzheimer's disease looked very similar. The researchers then started to look at how this drop in lithium might occur. Yankner said in the earliest stages there's a decrease in the uptake of lithium in the brain from the blood. They don't yet know exactly how or why it happens, but it's likely to be from a variety of things including reduced dietary intake, as well as genetic and environmental factors. The major source of lithium for most people is their diet. Some of the foods that have the most lithium are leafy green vegetables, nuts, legumes and some spices like turmeric and cumin. Some mineral waters are also rich sources. In other words, Yankner said, a lot of the foods that have already proven to be healthy and reduce a person's risk of dementia may be beneficial because of their lithium content. "You know, oftentimes one finds in science that things may have an effect, and you think you know exactly why, but then subsequently turn out to be completely wrong about why," he said. -CNN
