Latest news with #SamanthaEllis
Scoop
2 days ago
- Health
- Scoop
Attention! Road Safety Trial To Measure Brain Activity In Older Drivers
Press Release – University of the Sunshine Coast Samantha Ellis, a PhD candidate at the MAIC/UniSC Road Safety Research Collaboration, explained the research will specifically examine brain activity and how it relates to driving. University of the Sunshine Coast researchers are seeking older drivers for a new trial measuring age-related changes in attention, as part of a broader program to develop a screening method for assessing cognitive fitness to drive. Samantha Ellis, a PhD candidate at the MAIC/UniSC Road Safety Research Collaboration, explained the research will specifically examine brain activity and how it relates to driving. 'While a number of factors are important, we know that our ability to focus on the road is fundamental to safe driving,' she said. 'As we age, it's natural to experience changes in our attentional abilities. While these changes are normal, it is important to understand how they may impact our driving performance.' To measure this, researchers will have eligible participants perform computerised attention tasks while measuring their brain activity using an EEG. Participants will then complete measures of simulated driving to see how they respond and react behind the wheel, which will be compared to a control group of drivers aged below 30, with at least three years of driving experience. 'Unlike standard cognitive tests, the EEG will allow us to measure brain activity associated with attention in real-time,' Ms Ellis said. 'This will allow us to better understand how the measured brain activity relates to driving performance.' Researchers expect the trial will provide greater insights on how attention impacts driving ability as we get older, including whether compensatory behaviours have a place in maintaining safety. Senior Research Fellow Dr Kayla Stefanidis said this was crucial for informing the development of better tools to accurately assess cognitive fitness to drive. 'We want to keep older drivers who are safe, driving for as long as possible,' she said. Currently GPs and health professionals make assessments without the aid of any standardised measure or test for assessing cognitive fitness to drive. 'The development of a cognitive screening tool would help GPs and other health professionals accurately identify whether a patient requires further testing,' Dr Stefanidis said. 'For older adults, it could also reduce costly and unnecessary assessments in older adults who do not require them.' To be eligible, participants must be aged 60-90 and able to attend one appointment at the University of the Sunshine Coast Sippy Downs campus. People that wish to take part in the study can find out more here ( or contact the research team at ADS@
New York Post
4 days ago
- Health
- New York Post
How sleeping with your earrings in can age you prematurely: dermatologist warning
Talk about a lobe low. According to a dermatologist, keeping your studs in while you sleep isn't doing your future self any favors. 'I'm gonna give you some advice so that when you're sitting around with your girlfriends 20 years from now and they're all complaining of this cosmetic issue, you're gonna be like, well, I saw this random doctor on social media talk about this 20 years ago,' shared Dr. Samantha Ellis. The cosmetic issue in question? Saggy earlobes. 'As we age, our earlobes get saggier, they get looser, and if you wear earrings, that can become a problem because your earrings can start to look very sad in your ear holes,' she explained. Ellis noted that the issue typically doesn't express itself until we reach 40 plus, a point at which 'your earrings are not looking as cute in their holes as they once were.' The good news? You can keep your lobes pert with one quick trick. 'The easiest thing you can do to prevent premature stretching of your ear holes is to not sleep in your earrings,' she said. This does not apply to piercings in the upper ear, where the cartilage is fortified — if sleeping with earrings in those areas doesn't bother you, there's no harm or aesthetic pitfalls in doing so, she said. 'What I'm talking about is wearing earrings in this loose, floppy earlobe night after night, year after year, putting unnecessary strain and stress on your piercing holes and causing them to stretch out way sooner than they actually should,' she explained while pulling on her own earring-less lobe. 4 The combined effects of gravity and sleeping in your statement earrings can lead to yawning, piercing holes, and a loose fit for your favorite studs. sameer – Indeed, the combined effects of gravity and sleeping in your statement earrings can lead to yawning piercing holes, and a loose fit for your favorite studs. For those whose lobes have already been compromised from years of overuse, help is available in the form of ear fillers. The extra volume from fillers gives earring posts more cushion, which helps studs stick out straight and allows diamonds to catch the light. Unlike facial filler procedures, ear injections rarely go awry. There's a small risk of hitting a blood vessel, which could prevent healthy cell turnover, 'but you're not going to lose your hearing,' Dr. Melissa Doft, an uptown plastic surgeon, previously told The Post. There's also no downtime post-treatment. 'You can come in, have it done, and go to a luncheon afterward, or do a pilates class afterward.' Other experts maintain that, in addition to stretching out from wearing/sleeping in accessories, ear lobes naturally enlarge as we age. 'In general, as people get older, their ears get bigger,' New York-based plastic surgeon Dr. Stafford Broumand previously told Page Six. 4 Kris Jenner (pictured in 2016) underwent earlobe reduction surgery in 2018. Getty Images 4 Jenner (pictured in 2022) got the procedure in an episode of 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians.' Getty Images for Baby2Baby 'You think that they stop growing at a certain age, but they slowly get bigger. The earlobe tends to elongate so that gives an aging appearance. 'You want to sort of have a perky, full, small, tight ear, and as people age, they want to sort of minimize the subtleties of aging, and one of those is the ear size.' While critics call the treatment an easy way to prey on the insecurities of the aging population, Doft says having floppy earlobes can be surprisingly upsetting. In many cases, she said, her clients most miss wearing the earrings they'd received as mementos of significant life events or gifts. Lobe improvement for the love of bling is exactly what Brielle Biermann claimed her mother, Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kim Zolciak, did, tweeting in 2018: 'My mom gets filler in her ears because her diamond earrings are too heavy… #richpeopleproblems.' Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner took the desire for perky ears a step — and a scalpel — further, surgically reducing her earlobes in 2018.
Newsweek
03-07-2025
- Health
- Newsweek
Doctor Issues Stark Warning for Parents on 4th of July Weekend
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. As July 4th weekend approaches and revelers prepare to soak up the sunshine in celebration, dermatologists are urging parents to take sun-protection seriously. Dr. Hannah Kopelman, a dermatologist at Kopelman Hair Restoration, told Newsweek that every year she sees the same patterns repeat. Many people come prepared with sunscreen but fail to reapply it regularly or rub spray sunscreens in properly. Ultimately, common mistakes can lead to severe, and sometimes life-threatening sunburns. Dr. Samantha Ellis, another dermatologist with nearly a decade of experience, recently shared a warning on TikTok that resonated widely, with her video garnering over 90,000 views. Newsweek reached out to Dr. Samantha Ellis for comment via TikTok. She described how every year her office receives calls from people suffering from "life-changing, blistering, fever-inducing sunburns" after the holiday weekend. A stock image showing a little girl swimming in the pool. A stock image showing a little girl swimming in the pool. ChristinLola/iStock / Getty Images Plus Kopelman told Newsweek: "Just one blistering sunburn during childhood can more than double your lifetime risk of developing melanoma. That's because UV radiation causes direct DNA mutations in skin cells, and the earlier those changes start accumulating, the more likely they are to cause skin cancer later in life. "The skin has a long memory. I always tell parents: protecting your kids from sunburn isn't just about avoiding discomfort—it's literally cancer prevention." She explained that sunscreen breaks down due to sweat, water, and time, and must be reapplied at least every two hours or immediately after swimming or toweling off. Spray sunscreens can create a false sense of security if not thoroughly rubbed in. "Think of it like brushing your teeth: doing it once a day isn't enough. People also underestimate how much sunscreen they need. A full-body application requires at least a shot glass worth of sunscreen, and most people don't even come close to that," she added. Severe sunburns can also cause physical discomfort and psychological distress, including pain, irritability, embarrassment, and symptoms like fever and dehydration. These burns often limit holiday activities but are entirely preventable with proper care. "Severe burns can even come with fevers, chills, and dehydration. And all of it is avoidable. My best advice? Use a broad-spectrum SPF 30 or higher, apply it 15 minutes before going outdoors, rub it in thoroughly, and reapply every two hours—or immediately after swimming or sweating. Don't rely on sunscreen alone—wear UPF clothing, seek shade when you can, and protect yourself like your health depends on it—because it does," she said. A stock image showing people enjoying a pool party. A stock image showing people enjoying a pool party. monkeybusinessimages/iStock / Getty Images Plus Many TikTok users shared their own cautionary tales highlighting these common mistakes. Alyssa recounted: "One time my family went on a trip and my aunt fell asleep in the sun (she works crazy hours so we didn't want to wake her) so we liberally applied sunscreen when needed lol. On that same trip, my younger brother was doing great with sunscreen but one day he wore a drawstring backpack without a shirt on and the straps rubbed his sunscreen off in those areas and he burned. I also figured out I have PLME on that trip. I set alarms for sunscreen and didn't burn at all, but I had a horrible rash wherever I was exposed to the sun." Another user shared a family history of sun damage: "My entire childhood my dad would cut the grass without a shirt in southern Louisiana and when he would start peeling after a burn lay on the floor for us to peel his skin. He's in his 70s now and every time I see him and we are outside he tells me I better be wearing my sunscreen. He got skin cancer repeatedly over the last 30 years." The pain of severe burns was also described by Rachel: "I got burned sooo bad when kayaking 6 yrs ago. I had fevers, couldn't sleep, was in extreme pain for over a week. Been a diligent sunscreen reapplyer since. Also I just put a ton of spray sunscreen on, never rubbed it in and it doesn't matter." On the brighter side, one TikToker humorously dubbed themselves "the spf influencer," noting: "My friends and family call me the spf influencer bc I'm constantly reminding them which uv index it is and to cover themselves and stay in the shade with ofc spf50.. my bf even got me an uv umbrella—best Christmas gift!" Is there a health issue that's worrying you? Let us know via health@ We can ask experts for advice, and your story could be featured on Newsweek.
Spectator
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Should family history, however painful, be memorialised forever?
Be under no illusions: this is not a food memoir. Chopping Onions on My Heart is a linguistic exploration of belonging; a history of the Jewish community in Iraq; and an urgent endeavour to save an endangered language. Above all, it is a reckoning with generational trauma. The subjects of Samantha Ellis's previous books include the life of Anne Brontë, heroines of classic literature, feminism and romantic comedy. She is the daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, and the language she grew up around, the language of her people and culture, is dying. Judeo-Iraqi Arabic 'came out of the collisions of Hebrew-speaking Jews and Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, and then absorbed linguistic influences from all the other people who conquered Iraq'. Ellis is irrepressible in the way she talks about her mother tongue, calling it 'earthy, sinewy, witty, excessive, wry, noisy, vivid… Hot, where English often seems cold. Mouth-filling, where English seems empty. Patterned, when English seems plain.' Jewish people first came to Iraq in 586 BC. At the community's height in the 1940s there were 150,000 Jews living in the country. At best guess, by 2019 just five remained. Most left in the decade following Farhud, the pogrom carried out against the Jews of Baghdad over two days in 1941. More than 180 Jews were murdered and countless raped and injured. Ellis's father's family left for Israel, while her mother's stayed on for more than 20 years. But both her parents eventually ended up in London, where Ellis was born. She was raised speaking English, 'but all the gossip, all the stories, all the exciting, forbidden grown-up life happened in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic'. She quietly absorbed the language, but as she grew up, lost it. Now, as an adult and mother, she is acutely aware of the consequences for herself and her son. The mass exodus of Iraqi Jews in 1950-51, and their assimilation into adopted countries, meant that the language was marginalised, and speaker numbers dwindled fast. Ellis's early investigations are urgent, panicked, motivated by a combination of incredulity and guilt that a language that informs her heritage, but that she doesn't speak, isn't being preserved by someone else: 'I raced to my laptop to find out if anyone was saving my language. Someone had to be!' She begins language classes, visits museums and consults relatives. She attempts to trace the history of her people. She cannot accept that the reason languages become extinct is because second generation, non-native speakers 'didn't value or care for them, that we were recklessly letting them die'. She realises that 'there was always violence somewhere in the vanishing of languages. There certainly was in mine'. The mother tongue is 'earthy, sinewy, witty, excessive, wry, noisy, vivid…Hot, where English often seems cold' The psychological effect of being brought up by families who have experienced war, discrimination and displacement is what makes Ellis both neurotic and determined not to pass on that inherited fear to her son. When he garbles the history of how they came to Britain, Ellis decides: 'If I was going to unmuddle him, maybe I had to try to unmuddle myself first.' But how does one preserve the stories of a culture's past without also holding on to the pain that imbues them? In her search for home and belonging, she finds solace in cooking her country's traditional dishes. But this is not a tidy personal narrative that finds resolution in a comforting stew or finishes with a glorious homecoming wrapped neatly in bread dough. Ellis is wary of simplifying the past and making it more palatable through food. The problem is not Iraqi Jewish cuisine; that's the easy bit. It's the gnarly, traumatic parts that are harder to engage with. So, no, this is not a food memoir. And if at times it doesn't seem to know quite what it is, then isn't that sort of the point? Unpicking, extricating different facets of heritage is near impossible, compounded by the conflicting motivations of a second generation immigrant. What begins as a shapeless mass, a grey cloud of uncertainty, slowly morphs into a full-colour, defined picture of a more confident, peaceful acceptance of Ellis's duality – of being Judeo-Iraqi, but not in Iraq, of belonging to two places at once, even if one place cannot be visited. Like her identity, Ellis's book contains multitudes.
The Guardian
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Chopping Onions on My Heart by Samantha Ellis review – can you save a culture?
Samantha Ellis yearns to eat the nabug fruit that her Iraqi-Jewish parents recall from Baghdad back gardens. Yet when she asks for it in London's Iraqi shops, she's met only with blank looks. It took much effort for her to find the English name for the nabug – the Christ's thorn jujube – and even then she's unable to source seeds online. Eventually an Iraqi Muslim friend brings her a bag of the fruits. She shares them with her mother, who lights up: 'It's nabug!'. She tells her grandson she hasn't eaten one in 50 years, and despite wanting a Haribo, he joins his grandmother and mother in enjoying the taste, 'like a cross between an apricot and a date'. This story in Ellis's memoir is, like the book itself, about many things – loss, the distance between generations, nostalgia for a place one has never been, and the power of food to evoke memory – but perhaps most fundamentally, it is a story about language; of its slipperiness and ambiguity. It's not clear whether nabug is, in fact, an Arabic or a Judaeo-Arabic word. Ellis grew up hearing her parents and grandparents speak this language and developed an imperfect, passive knowledge of it. Unlike Yiddish, which has a substantial literature, Judaeo-Arabic was primarily used orally and has no standardised form. Even when Ellis starts attending Judaeo-Arabic classes, her mother often doesn't recognise the words and phrases she is being taught. There isn't even a universally agreed name for the language. Ellis's book is a linguistic feast (as well as a gastronomic one – recipes are included). The book's title is taken from a splendidly histrionic idiom – 'You're chopping onions on my heart!' – and Ellis relishes the 'hotness' of Judaeo-Arabic over the frigidity of English. I too loved phrases such as 'she talks like she has kubba [a kind of dumpling] in her mouth', with which her family would affectionately mock her youthful mangling of the language. The sounds are inviting, too: Skitti oo-khalia – 'shut up and leave it' – sounds somehow just right. But there's a deep anxiety behind Ellis's interest. Unesco classes Judaeo-Iraqi Arabic as 'potentially vulnerable', because it is not being passed on to new generations. Ellis's desire to preserve it is shot through with guilt about her former passivity, as well as despair at the magnitude of the task. Tracing their history back to Babylonian times, the Jews of Baghdad prospered even into the modern era, despite legal inequality and occasional persecution. Yet the situation deteriorated rapidly amid the post-first world war upheavals that brought both western imperialism and modern nationalism to post-Ottoman Iraq, and Zionism to what would become Israel. The 1941 pogrom known as the Farhud left hundreds dead, and by the early 50s most Jews had either been expelled or emigrated, sometimes to Israel where they faced discrimination in the early years of the state. Ellis's mother's family held out until the early 70s, when all but a handful of members of this ancient community fled Saddam Hussein's oppression. The political implications of the fate of Iraqi Jewry are bitterly contested. For Ellis, though, this is primarily a personal tragedy and a boundlessly sad one. There is no going back to what was lost, and it isn't clear what her own responsibilities are to the future; what she should pass on to her son and what she should let go of. Her efforts to find the words to speak as Iraqi Jews once did never fully succeed. However, by the book's end she comes to accept the imperfections of her knowledge and the messiness of her inheritance. Ellis's book is a useful reminder that Jewish generational trauma is not confined to the descendants of those who survived the Holocaust. In fact, given the ubiquity of refugees in the modern world, Chopping Onions on My Heart's aching sense of loss has a truly global resonance. Keith Kahn-Harris is the author of Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish People Are Not Who You Think They Are Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture by Samantha Ellis is published by Chatto & Windus (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
