Category: Educational

Books That Say Stress Kills Brain Cells

Chronic stress is damaging to the brain. If you want to maintain brain health, you have to keep the stress hormone cortisol levels low to the extent possible. This is mentioned in many brain health related books and web articles.

  • In Dr. Mark Hyman’s book The UltraMind Solution, key #7 is to “Calm Your Mind”. On page 53, he writes that cortisol damages the hippocampus part of the brain.
  • The book Brain Longevity by Dr. Dharma Khalsa, it says similarly that cortisol affects the hippocampus, and that the hippocampus of Alzheimer patients are significantly smaller as the disease progresses. It also points out that day-after-day and year-after-year of chronic stress can kill billions of brain cells. [page 121] Dr. Khalsa talks more about stress on the brain in his web article and in a video on fora.tv.
  • In the book You: The Owner’s Manual, Dr. Michael Roizen and Dr. Mehmet Oz says that action number 4 of the section “Your Brain: The Live Younger Action Plan” is to “reduce stress”. And it again mentions the link between cortisol, stress, and brain health.
  • Page 30 of Dr. Daniel Amen’s Magnificent Mind at Any Age points out that older adult with long-term elevated levels of cortisol had smaller hippocampus and performed worse on memory tests.
  • The book The Memory Cure says on page 76 that chronic stress is one of the risk factors for Alzheimer’s. The type of stress can be that of a stressful job for example. The stress is damaging to many organs of the body including the brain.
  • Page 176 of the book The Brain’s Behind It again mentions that stress can kill hippocampal neurons.
  • In book Ultraprevention, page 112 of the Kindle Edition, it says “Cortisol kills neurons, especially in a particularly sensitive area called the hippocampus.”
  • Page 66 of book Fat Chance it writes “In particular, cortisol kills neurons that play a role in the inhibition of food intake.”

Since it might be difficult for you to find the references to all of those books mention, here are some links to some web articles that say’s basically the same thing — that stress is harmful to the brain.

There are also YouTube videos about stress on the brain.

  • Google Talks video of Dr. John Medina talking about brain health. Dr. Medina says that “stress damages cognition in virtually every way cognition can be measured”
  • And here is a video reporting on stressed versus unstressed rats in a memory task of remembering location of submerged platform.
  • In page 75 of the book, The Chemistry of Calm, it says that prolonged elevation of cortisol can lead to fat storage, insulin resistance, inflammation, and brain degeneration.

Atlantis Space Shuttle Launch Video

Have you ever watched a space shuttle launch before?

You can watch on YouTube, this video by NASAtelevision of Atlantis STS-129 launch to the International Space Station. You see the countdown, launch, and solid rocket booster separation. You also get commentary on what exactly is happening as well as hearing the crew in the shuttle and controllers.

The commentator gives interesting facts and explanation (providing stats on the shuttle speed and time of the flight)

World’s Largest Snake

The world’s largest living snake specie in terms of weight is the green anaconda.  The scientific name is Eunectes murinus. It can weigh over 200 pounds and reach lengths of 16 feet.  Although some pythons can be longer, the anaconda is larger in the sense that they are heavier.

The fictional action thriller movie “Anaconda” is about that snake.  However in the movie, they use a mechanical snake, which was built to a size larger than the real size one.  I don’t think you can train a snake to do those things.

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Indian Farmers commit suicide every 30 minutes

Video report on DemocracyNow.org with a report from Smita Narula in 2011…

According to statistics, a quarter of a million Indian farmers committed suicide in the last 16 years. Doing some math, this is equivalent to one suicide every 30 minutes for years.

This is due to insurmountable debt caused by government’s removal of agricultural subsidies and global competition with genetically modified cotton seeds which are resistance to pests. Farmers go into debt in order to purchase these more expensive seeds in order to compete. Unfortunately these seeds require more water than traditional seeds. And since most farms in India are watered by rain and have lack of irrigation, the crops often fail. Trapped in a cycle of insurmountable debt, some farmers consume the pesticide that they purchased in order to kill themselves. Some write suicide notes to government hoping that someone would listen.

One farmer had to put her teenage children to work in the 7 acre farm. After daily toiling for a year, they probably earn about $250 for the entire year.

Video Lecture on Time Travel

The Vega Science Trust video collection has a video linked here of Professor Paul Davies giving a scientific talk on wormholes and the possibility of time travel. The lecture is targeted to the general audience so you do not need to be a physicist to understand it. In fact, Davies showed only two equations and one of them is the famous “e equals m c squared”.

Watch video »

There are very interesting ideas and some time travel paradoxes presented. Another article explains some paradoxes of time travel.

He made reference to singularity, anti-gravity, relativity, black hole, world line, and space time diagrams. The idea to get out of this lecture is that physics does not preclude the possibility of time travel. And in fact time travel into the future is possible and the effects can be measured. It is time travel into the past that is tougher. It is not that the laws of physics prevent it, but that to achieve it would be so great of an undertaking that practicality precludes it. There were some bits of humor in the lecture and Davies concluded with a great ending.

There was a small question and answer session at the end where Davies made a point that if in fact a time machine can be invented, it can never bring a person back to a time before the machine’s invention.

Whether time travel is possible or not is a question that physicists are still debating. They may not come up with a definitive answer until the quantum mechanics and general relativity have been unified under the grand unified theory (of which they are still working on).

Video: Steven Levitt analyzes drug dealing economics

In this 2004 TED.com video, Steven Levitt presents analysis of drug dealing economics.

Steven Levit is the author of Freakonomics. Drug dealing is not as lucrative as some people might think, or as what is portrayed in the movies. It turns out that the lowest tier drug dealer makes the equivalent of $3.50 per hour — this is lower than the minimum age — which is why some drug dealer have to work part-time at McDonalds.

Worse than that is that it is a dangerous profession, with the chances of being killed on the same ballpark as that of soldiers in a war zone. Inner city drug dealers has about a 25% chance of getting killed over a four-year period.

In the video he compares the organization of drug gangs to that of the organization of McDonald’s where there are different tiers, levels, and hierarchy. Unlike the low-tier drug dealer, drug gang leaders (equivalent to that of a McDonald’s franchisee owner), however can make substantial amount of money — about $100,000 a year.

The video does have some humor injected into it by the presenter.

Radio interview with a freelancer

National Public Radio program on July 2, 2010 was about the self-employed. You can hear an archive of the program linked here. What is it like to be self employed or to be a freelancer? Have you ever thought about going into business on your own and working for yourself. Listen as callers call in to describe their story.

The guests also give some interesting finding from various studies about self-employment.

NOVA Video on Hydrogen Fuel Cars

Watch this Nova video documentary about the technology of using hydrogen fuel cell in powering cars. The video is hosted by Robert Krulwich and starring Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the CarTalk brothers who does the weekly Cartalk radio show.

The video is 14 minutes long. The promise of fuel cells is very appealing as it makes cars emit nothing except water as a by product. However, the difficulty is getting enough hydrogen and storing it in the fuel tank. You can learn more about how fuel cells work in this Clickable Car.