Features

Singing in a community choir may provide some psychological benefit to seniors, a small study suggests. 

Researchers had primarily hoped to see choir participation yield improvements in elderly people’s thinking skills and physical fitness, but that didn’t happen. They did, however, see improvements in loneliness and interest in life among seniors in the singing groups. 

The study was conducted at 12 senior centres serving racially and ethnically diverse communities in and around San Francisco. Half of the centres were randomly selected for the choir programme; the others served as a control group. 

Ultimately, 208 people participated in the choirs and 182 in the control group. None of them had been singing regularly with other groups. 

Overall, the average age was 71, and three-quarters of participants were women. Two-thirds reported being from minority racial or ethnic backgrounds. Forty-one per cent had been born outside the US, 20 per cent reported financial hardship, 25 per cent reported fair or poor health and 60 per cent had at least two chronic medical conditions. 

Roughly one in four participants had depression, but no one who enrolled in the study had any cognitive problems, the authors report in the journal Innovation in Aging. 

More than half of the patients in the choir group (55 per cent) had not previously sung in a choir as an adult, and more than half (56 per cent) rated their musical ability as poor or fair. 

Each of the choirs met 23 times over the course of six months. Professional choir conductors led the sessions, which also included physical activities such as walking to different parts of the room to sing. More than 90 per cent of people in both groups stayed in the study for the whole six months. 

At the end, there were no significant differences between the groups in the primary outcome measures of the study: scores on tests of cognitive function, lower body strength and overall psychosocial health. 

There were, however, significant improvements in two components of the psychosocial evaluation among choir participants. People in this group were feeling less lonely, and they were more interested in life — that is, their responses to survey questions indicated they were more interested in things, got more things done, were doing more interesting things and felt more motivated. 

Seniors in the control group, meanwhile, did not see a large change in their scores for loneliness at the end of the six months, and their interest in life declined slightly. 

“Because music [and singing] is integral to most cultures and are relatively easy and low-cost to deliver in community settings, community choirs . . . have the potential to improve the well-being of a large number of older adults,” study leader Julene Johnson of the University of California, San Francisco told Reuters Health by e-mail. 

Older adults who feel lonely are more likely to be at risk of declining motor functions, poor physical well-being and even death, studies have shown. 

Johnson’s study adds to older research showing that music may give adults the opportunity to remain active and engaged. 

Choirs can also be tailored according to the culture of the communities, making them accessible to diverse populations, she and her colleagues point out, and are a relatively cheap tool for improving health outcomes. 

“Increasing evidence suggests that loneliness is linked to broad-based physical and psychological morbidity, and it may reduce longevity,” said Dawn Mackey of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, who was not involved in the study. 

“It’s encouraging that both arts-based and physical-activity based interventions may improve mental well-being for older adults and help them add quality to years,” she said via email.

Healthcare costs increased across both the groups during the study period, although the increase was smaller in the intervention group.

It remains to be seen whether healthcare costs over the long term could be saved by helping adults feel less lonely. 

“It is certainly possible that reducing feelings of loneliness and increasing interest in life may eventually save healthcare costs in the long term, but we have to test that hypothesis,” Johnson said.

Killing Commendatore

Haruki Murakami 

Translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018

Pp. 681

Haruki Murakami’s latest book contains all the elements usually found in his epic novels: There is a first-person narrator, in this case, an artist who remains nameless; flashbacks to historical instances of human cruelty; a parallel world, and so on. But nothing is really the same. In “Killing Commendatore”, Murakami creates a handful of totally original characters and settings, while connecting several seemingly disparate stories from Japan to Vienna to the underworld into a single plot.

The story opens with a riddle elicited by a visit from the supernatural world. The artist-narrator is awakened by a faceless man who demands that he draw his portrait. The artist tries to beg off: “There was only a void, and how are you supposed to give form to something that does not exist?” (p. 4)

Yet, he is convinced that the incident is real: “If this was a dream, then the world I’m living in itself must all be a dream.” (p. 5)

This conviction steers the plot seamlessly between reality and the parallel world—a world governed by connectivity, according to a logic that is all of Murakami’s making. 

Rich cultural references, especially to music, are typical of Murakami’s novels, but this time though music is often mentioned, visual art predominates. Added to the protagonist’s work as an artist, there is the fact that it is a masterful but obscure painting that unleashes the plot. After the protagonist’s wife breaks off their marriage without notice, a friend offers him a place to stay in the mountains. The house belongs to his friend’s father who was a famous painter, but is now sinking into dementia in a care facility. Quite by chance, the protagonist discovers one of the old man’s paintings that he had hidden in the attic, as it records an incident in his youth he has tried to forget. When the protagonist unwraps it, he opens a perilous chasm that can only be closed if he undertakes certain acts: “The longer I looked at the painting, the less clear was the threshold between reality and unreality, flat and solid, substance and image.” (p. 240) 

The threshold is further undermined by the ringing of a mysterious bell in the night, and the appearance of a miniature human form that embodies an idea. They both intrigue and frighten him, but he soon understands that they provide the clues to what he must do to rescue Mariye, his art student who has disappeared. He undertakes a perilous journey somewhat like that of ancient mythical heroes. On the way, he realises he is living in a world governed by connectivity: As one of the guides on his journey says, “No one can tell what is or is not the real thing… All that we see is a product of connectivity. Light here is a metaphor for shadow, shadow a metaphor for light.” (p. 573)

The protagonist’s journey in the world of connectivity is intense and raises interesting philosophical questions, but it is less convincing and absorbing than the parallel worlds in other Murakami’s novels. More fascinating by far are the psychological implications of the interaction between the characters and the protagonist’s reaction to his otherworldly encounters, which account for the bulk of the narrative. 

While married, the artist had painted portraits on commission in order to have a steady income. Alone in the house in the mountains, he is free to return to his original intent of doing oil paintings with various themes. Yet, as soon as he meets Menshiki, his new neighbour, the latter, a mysterious, seemingly generous and cultured man, asks the artist to paint his portrait; he will pay any price. That done, Menshiki proceeds to request one of a young girl, who is the artist’s student and whom Menshiki thinks may be his daughter. While his commissioned portraits were replicas done to please the subject, in the new ones, the artist sets out to capture the subject’s soul. He is so technically skilful that he doesn’t need the subject to sit for him but takes up his paintbrush alone after extensive conversations with these two subjects. Though there is no sign that Murakami is himself an artist, his descriptions of this creative process are fascinating. The painting sessions are a play on appearance and reality as is much of the story.

Besides Murakami’s unique blend of fantasy and reality, his tone is also what makes his writing so distinctive. In the narrative, there is a constant collision of mundane actions and extraordinary occurrences, yet all is described in a matter-of-fact tone. The protagonist’s emotional reactions to even the most dramatic events are always understated. This may be what gives credibility to the fantasy elements in the story. It can also be Murakami’s take on the world where anything can happen.

I just watched the movie I Am Pretty at the cinema in Amman. I walked out of it feeling determined to live life out of a confident soul instead of constantly letting my size and looks determine how I feel.

If you have not seen this movie yet, I recommend you watch it. It will open your eyes to all the ways we set ourselves up for success or failure simply based on how confident we feel about ourselves. Our feelings of selfworth affect our internal dialogue and how we present ourselves to the world around us.

Confident is beautiful

Whether we are a size two or a size 20, it’s not the number that defines us or adds to our value as human beings. Once we see ourselves from that lens then we are freed from the shackles of cultural norms that dictate what beauty should look like. What this movie proves is that confidence is beautiful. When I feel confident, I tend to make better choices. Self-confidence means I can connect with my passions on a deeper level instead of wasting time berating myself for eating the wrong food or messing up. When my confidence is high, I am able to recover much quicker when I make poor food choices. This is the key to living a healthy lifestyle that will last us for the remainder of our lives.

Cultivating confidence

Just like you would train for a marathon by running a few kilogrammes every day, you can train yourself to boost your confidence and rewire your brain to be kinder and more compassionate towards yourself. This is a lot harder than it really is because our brains have been hard-wired for so many years by our negative thinking. When we look in the mirror, how often do we focus on the beautiful things about us instead of looking at the things that we wish we could change? Have you ever thought what it might do to your life as a desperate dieter if you started focusing on the things you like about your body? Listen to what you tell yourself when you look into that mirror, to that inner dialogue. When you focus on the negative it becomes your obsession; it draws you deeper into that endless pit of toxic self-loathing that does nothing, but lower your self-esteem instead of empowering you to live the life God intended for you.

Disillusioned confidence

Many mistakenly believe that their value and self-worth are directly tied to that number on the scale and to those digits printed on that label sewn on the inside of their clothes. We have been raised in a society that makes us feel confident only when we are the right size, the right weight, wearing the right clothes, the right make up and being seen with the right people in the right places. Then, and only then, we might feel confident enough to matter. This kind of disillusioned confidence is dangerous because it is short lived. Beauty fades, size changes, people come and go and you find yourself trying to build another fantasy made up of a new illusion of pretending that you have got it all together when deep down in your soul you’re in fact just crumbling to pieces because you forgot who you really are. You have lost your true identity trying to be someone you are not because of this crazy rat race everyone is trying to run to be something they are not. There is more to us than the size of our clothes and the food we eat. 

Being you

Perhaps the most mature thing and most compassionate gift we can give ourselves is to just be ourselves. Here are some suggestions:

• Maybe we can make a truce with our poor bodies that have grown so tired of trying to squeeze into those skinny jeans

• Maybe we can actually start taking a breath, instead of holding our breath in, as we try to zip up those trousers we bought that are three sizes too small, thinking that we can lose 10 kilogrammes in a month!

• Maybe we can start being confident enough to wear our real size and not think twice about what that number says on our tags

• Maybe we can begin to understand that there is no such thing as “One Size Fits All” like the industry keeps pushing on us. We are all different shapes and sizes and that is what makes us all unique and beautiful

• Maybe we could focus on something else and discover that our obsession with food and weight is actually causing us to eat more since that is all that is on our minds

• Maybe if we trust ourselves enough, we could surprise ourselves and learn that we are mature enough to handle failure because that is not the worst thing that can happen to us. The worst thing would be to lose confidence in ourselves. The worst thing would be to lose touch with our beautiful soul and not recognise who we are anymore

Let us hold our heads up high and be confident in who God created us to be: beautiful, intelligent, vibrant, resourceful, creative, unique, courageous individuals who bring joy into the world we live in. Let our goal each morning be to do our best at being ourselves. Be the best you that you can be and walk confidently as you feel empowered to make the changes that you want to make and not what society imposes on you. Let us live fully and unashamedly and trust me, once you do that, taking better care of your body will come naturally because when you love your body, it will love you back!

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

Pregnant women should not be exposed to even low levels of a group of chemicals associated with a wide range of neurodevelopmental disorders in children, scientists argue. 

Pesticides known as organophosphates were originally developed as nerve gases and weapons of war, and today are used to control insects at farms, golf courses, shopping malls and schools. People can be exposed to these chemicals through the food they eat, the water they drink and the air they breathe. 

Restrictions on these chemicals have reduced but not eliminated human exposure in recent years. The chemicals should be banned outright because even at low levels currently allowed for agricultural use, organophosphates have been linked to lasting brain impairment in children, scientists argue in a policy statement published in PLoS Medicine. 

“Exposure to these organophosphate pesticides before birth is associated with conditions that can persist into late childhood and/or pre-adolescence, and may last a lifetime,” lead author of the statement Irva Hertz-Picciotto, director of the Environmental Health Sciences Centre at the University of California Davis School of Medicine in California, told Reuters Health. 

“Research on organophosphates now presents strong evidence that includes behavioural outcomes such as problems with attention, hyperactivity, full-blown ADHD, autistic symptoms or autism spectrum disorder or other behavioural issues,” Hertz-Picciotto said in an e-mail. 

Despite growing evidence of harm, many organophosphates remain in widespread use. This may be in part because low-level, ongoing exposures typically do not cause visible, short-term clinical symptoms, leading to the incorrect assumption that these exposures are inconsequential, Hertz-Picciotto said. 

“Acute poisoning is tragic, of course, however the studies we reviewed suggest that the effects of chronic, low-level exposures on brain functioning persist through childhood and into adolescence and may be lifelong, which also is tragic,” Hertz-Picciotto said. 

Once the organophosphates enter the lungs or the gut, they are absorbed into the bloodstream, and can pass through the placenta to babies developing in the womb. From there, the blood can carry these chemicals to the developing brain. 

To prevent prenatal exposure to these chemicals, the products should no longer be used for agricultural or other purposes, scientists argue. Water should also be monitored for the presence of these chemicals, and there should be a central system for reporting pesticide use and illnesses linked to the products. 

Absent a complete ban on these chemicals, doctors and nurses should receive training to learn how to recognise and treat neurodevelopmental disorders related to exposure, and clinicians should also educate patients on how to avoid or minimise exposure. 

Eating organic foods may also help curb exposure to pesticides, Hertz-Picciotto advised. 

Pregnant women can also help prevent neurodevelopmental disorders in children by taking prenatal vitamins with folic acid and iron. 

“We have known for several decades that high exposure to organophosphates can cause severe neurological impacts, and even death; this isn’t surprising, after all, because they were originally designed as nerve agents in the period between the two world wars,” said Dr Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings Programme at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. 

Since then, widespread use of these chemicals at lower levels in pesticides was assumed to be harmless to humans, Allen, who was not involved in the paper, said by e-mail. 

“This was shortsighted,” Allen said. “The scientific evidence has piled up and it shows that even low-level, prenatal exposure can cause high-level, lifelong effects.”

Patients with irritable bowel syndrome may find that hypnotherapy helps them cope with their symptoms, a new study shows. 

Irritable bowel syndrome is a chronic gastrointestinal disorder with abdominal pain, stomach discomfort, altered bowel habits and other symptoms, the study authors explain in the journal Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology. 

“A lot of patients suffer from IBS worldwide, across age groups and cultures,” lead study author Carla Flik of the University Medical Centre in Utrecht, The Netherlands told Reuters Health by e-mail. 

Worldwide, the estimated prevalence of IBS is 11 per cent, ranging from 14 per cent to 24 per cent for women and 5 per cent to 19 per cent for men. Some medications are helpful, but there’s no cure. 

Flik and colleagues conducted a randomised controlled trial in 11 hospitals in The Netherlands. Altogether they enrolled 342 patients with IBS and randomly assigned them into three groups. For 12 weeks, 142 patients received individual hypnotherapy, 146 did group hypnotherapy and 54 got educational supportive therapy instead of hypnotherapy. 

Flik based the treatment on a protocol developed at the University Hospital of South Manchester in the UK in the 1980s. It is a “gut-directed” therapy that includes progressive relaxation, soothing imagery and a focus on easing the individual’s abdominal symptoms. 

Patients in the new study reported that hypnotherapy was helpful not just immediately after the 12-week treatment period but also during the next nine months. 

At the end of the follow-up period, 41 per cent of patients in the individual hypnotherapy group and 50 per cent who got group hypnotherapy reported adequate relief from their symptoms, compared to 23 per cent in the educational group. 

Olafur Palsson of the Centre for Functional GI and Motility Disorders at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who wrote an editorial that was published with the study, told Reuters Health, “This is the largest trial of hypnosis treatment for IBS and in many ways is very well done.” 

“Psychological treatment has shown a high success rate in improving IBS,” he said in a phone interview. “Using the brain to help the gut is a different mechanism than using medications that treat the gut directly.” 

“Fundamentally, if the usual medical approaches don’t seem to be working well and you have persistent symptoms, this could be a good option,” Palsson said. 

The readers of this column will forgive me if they find the title of this week’s article somewhat obvious. Of course, we all know that computers are about numbers, but we often forget it. Does it really matter? Is there any point in keeping in mind this trait of the devices?

It is understood that we do not have to be mathematicians to use computers; thank God for that. However, like driving a car and just knowing that there is an engine under the bonnet without being yourself a mechanic, it is good from time to time to remember that everything we see, hear, read or write while using a computer is a matter of zeroes and ones in the end, deep inside the guts of the machine.

What happens between the “zeroes and ones” stage and the one that shows us photos, plays music, takes us to the Internet, or processes text is another story. It is actually what makes computers truly magical digital devices, though we tend to forget it.  

Remembering that it is all about numbers has advantages. To start with it allows you to better communicate with parties who do need to talk numbers. These can be your Internet service provider, the salesperson trying to recommend this or that model of laptop, or the IT technician who is trying to repair your computer. You really need to talk gigabytes and such numbers with them. For instance many consumers still make the confusion between megabyte and megabit when referring to an Internet connection speed. The first unit being eight times higher than the second.

People working at helpdesks often find it hard to communicate with users and solve their problems, precisely because of a general lack in technical knowledge at the users’ end.

All computer operating systems have a function that lets you check and monitor how much memory and processing power is actually taken by the various software applications you use. This is a precious “gauge” (to use automotive terminology) that allows each and every one of us to optimise our computers’ performance by seeing which of the programmes we are running consumes the most memory, processing power or disk space.

It is simple and does not take real mathematics to run, but it does requires reading and understanding numbers. Under MS-Windows operating system this gauge is found under Task Manager and can be directly called by pressing the Alt+Ctrl+Delete keys combination.

Another illustration of the importance of numbers is your device’s IP address. This is the number that the network you are connected to gives you and that uniquely identifies your computer, in the whole world! It is like your phone number when you include the country and area code. It is unique in the world. Until recently IP addresses have been using what is called the IPV4 protocol (or numbering method) that can handle up to 4.3 billion addresses, given its numbering structure.

Now 4.3 billion computer Internet addresses are just not enough anymore, given the extraordinary usage of the web by not only computers but also by a growing number of devices, including smartphones, connected TVs and countless other Internet-enabled equipment. The industry is now replacing IPV4 with IPV6, an updated numbering system for Internet-connected devices that can handle a numbers of addresses equivalent to “2 power 128”. This is the number 340 followed by 36 zeroes! IPV6 should serve the world for a while. It is numbers again.

And if you think you’ll never need to know your computer’s IP address think again. You’ll be asked for it in many instances. If you don’t know it — and you certainly do not need to memorise it — just open a web tab in your Internet browser and type “What is my IP”, you will immediately see the answer in the form of a number consisting of four sets of up to three digits each, separated by a dot, that is if you are still under the IPV4 Internet protocol, 149.200.113.11 for instance.

Understanding numbers is also very helpful when processing images and making decisions about the resolution or the pixel count, or compressing the image before emailing it. Let is not forget the fringe benefit that also comes from being able to talk numbers: it is a social one and it lets you better discuss computers and IT matters with your friends in the evening.

Whatever you do with your computers, ignoring numbers may be a limiting factor.

Facebook Inc. let some companies, including Netflix and Airbnb, access users’ lists of friends after it cut off that data for most other apps around 2015, according to documents released on Wednesday by a British lawmaker investigating fake news and social media.

The 223 pages of internal communication from 2012 to 2015 between high-level employees, including founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, provide new evidence of previously aired contentions that Facebook has picked favourites and engaged in anti-competitive behaviour.

The documents show that Facebook tracked growth of competitors and denied them access to user data available to others.

In 2014, the company identified about 100 apps as being either “Mark’s friends” or “Sheryl’s friends”, and also tracked how many apps were spending money on Facebook ads, according to the documents, referring to Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

The insight into the thinking of Facebook executives over that period could invite new regulatory scrutiny into its business practices. 

Facebook said it stood by its deliberations and decisions, but noted that it would relax one “out-of-date” policy that restricted competitors’ use of its data.

One document said such competitor apps had previously needed Zuckerberg’s approval before using tools Facebook makes available to app developers.

Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Wednesday that the company could have prevented the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal had it cracked down on app developers a year earlier in 2014.

Misuse of Facebook user data by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, along with another data breach this year and revelations about Facebook’s lobbying tactics have heightened government scrutiny globally on the company’s privacy and content moderation practices.

Stifel analysts on Wednesday lowered their rating on Facebook shares to “hold,” saying that “political and regulatory blowback seems like it may lead to restrictions on how Facebook operates, over time”.

Damian Collins, a Conservative British parliamentarian, who leads a committee on media and culture, made the internal documents public after demanding them last month under threat of sanction from Six4Three.

The defunct app developer obtained them as part of its on going lawsuit in California state court alleging that Facebook violated promises to app developers when it ended their access to likes, photos and other data of users’ friends in 2015.

Facebook, which has described the Six4Three case as baseless, said the released communications were “selectively leaked” and it defended its practices.

‘Whitelisted’ for access to friends data

Though filed under seal and redacted in the lawsuit, the internal communications needed to be made public because “they raise important questions about how Facebook treats users’ data, their policies for working with app developers, and how they exercise their dominant position in the social media market”, Collins said on Twitter.

Dating app Badoo and ride-hailing app Lyft were among other companies “whitelisted” for access to data about users’ friends, the documents showed.

Lyft wanted to show carpool riders their mutual friends as an “ice breaker”, even if those friends were not using Lyft, according to one e-mail. Facebook said in an e-mail that it approved the request because it would add to a feeling of “safety” for riders.

Facebook described such deals as short-term extensions, but it is unclear exactly when the various agreements ended.

Netflix, Airbnb, Lyft and Badoo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The documents show an exchange between Zuckerberg and senior executive, Justin Osofsky in 2013, in which they decided to stop giving friends’ list access to Vine on the day that social media rival Twitter Inc launched the video-sharing service. 

“We’ve prepared reactive PR,” Osofsky wrote, to which Zuckerberg replied, “Yup, go for it.”

Twitter declined to comment.

Friends’ data had stoked the growth of many apps because it enabled people to easily connect with Facebook buddies on a new service. 

Facebook weighed charging other apps for access to its developer tools, including the friends lists, if they did not buy a certain amount of advertising from Facebook, according to the e-mails. In one from 2012, Zuckerberg wrote that he was drawing inspiration for business models from books he had been reading about the banking industry.

Facebook said it ultimately maintained free access to the tools.

Girls who are exposed before birth to chemicals commonly found in toothpaste, makeup, soap and other personal care products may hit puberty earlier than their peers who aren’t exposed to these chemicals in the womb, a US study suggests. 

Many chemicals have been linked to early puberty in animal studies including phthalates, which are often found in scented products like perfumes, soaps and shampoos; parabens, which are used as preservatives in cosmetics; and phenols, which include triclosan, researchers note in Human Reproduction. While this is thought to interfere with sex hormones and puberty timing, few studies have explored this connection in human children. 

For the current study, researchers followed 338 children from birth through adolescence. They tested mothers’ urine during pregnancy and interviewed them about potential chemical exposures, then tested kids’ urine for chemical exposure at 9 years old and examined children for signs of puberty development every nine months between ages 9 and 13 years. 

Over 90 per cent of kids’ urine samples showed concentrations of all the potentially hormone-altering chemicals, except for triclosan, which was found in 73 per cent of pregnant mothers’ urine samples and 69 per cent of their kids’ urine samples. 

For every doubling in concentration of a phthalate indicator in mothers’ urine, their daughters developed pubic hair an average of 1.3 months earlier, the study found. And with every doubling of mothers’ urine concentrations of triclosan, girls started menstruating one month earlier. 

Boys’ puberty timing didn’t appear to be influenced by prenatal exposure to these chemicals. 

“There has been considerable concern about why girls are entering puberty earlier and hormone disrupting chemicals like the ones in personal care products that we studied have been suggested as one possible reason,” said lead study author Kim Harley, associate director of the Centre for Environmental Research and Children’s Health at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Half of the girls in the study started growing pubic hair when they were at least 9.2 years old and then began menstruating when they were 10.3 years old, the study found. 

Phthalates, parabens and triclosan are not banned for use in personal care products, and there isn’t solid evidence yet that they cause health effects in humans, Harley said by e-mail.

But the current results add to increasing evidence from lab studies that suggests these chemicals can disrupt or interfere with natural hormones in the body like estrogen, Harley added.

“The fact that we find associations with earlier puberty in girls is additionally concerning,” Harley said. “The good news is, that if women want to reduce their exposure to these chemicals, there are steps they can take.”

Triclosan is no longer allowed in antibacterial soap in the US, but it is still in toothpaste, Harley said. Consumers should make sure it’s not a listed ingredient on any toothpaste they buy, she advised.

Parabens are also on the ingredients list, often as methyl paraben, or propyl paraben, and consumers should avoid these products, too, Harley said.

Diethyl phthalate is harder to avoid, however, because it isn’t listed on labels and is often used in fragrances, Harley said. 

The study wasn’t designed to prove whether or how prenatal exposure to these chemicals might have caused early puberty. And one limitation of the study is that researchers lacked data to know if girls going through puberty might be more likely to use these personal care products, and be directly exposed that way, the study authors note. 

“The effects of these chemicals are very complex,” said Dr Luz Claudio of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. 

Foreigners travelling to my home country India often ask me for suggestions about which cities or towns they should visit during their vacation. I give them a fairly unbiased recommendation and usually direct them to places I would myself like to go to. I mean, I belong to a large nation and despite being an avid traveller; there are still many regions that I have not explored as yet. Sending other people to these venues makes me feel that I have made a contribution of some sort-towards making a trudge to those locations at some point in the future, perhaps.

After promoting my motherland as an unofficial goodwill ambassador for more than two decades, my confidence has recently taken a beating. And that is because many townships are no longer called what they used to be, and are undergoing a drastic name change. Just when I had got used to the first batch of the new nomenclature like Bombay Mumbai, Calcutta Kolkata, Cochin Kochi and Bangalore Bengaluru, which were mostly a phonetic switch, there came another rush of unfamiliar naming. And this time there was whiff of a political motive behind it, as history was raked up to rediscover long lost connections, simply to satisfy a section of the electorate just before elections. 

Allahabad, the judicial capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, is now christened Prayagraj. The ancient name of the city is Prayag (Sanskrit for “place of sacrifice”), as it is believed to be the spot where Lord Brahma offered his first sacrifice after creating the world. It is also known as Triveni Sangam because of the confluence of three rivers, the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati. The popular belief is that when Mughal emperor Akbar visited the region in 1574 to quell a rebellion, he changed the city’s name from the erstwhile Prayag to Illahabad (the abode of the Gods), which then got anglicised by the British to Allahabad.

The Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, says of the site (the exact spot where the three rivers meet): “People who bathe there go to heaven. People who die there are liberated from the cycle of birth. People who live there are guarded by the gods.” It also hosts the world’s largest pilgrimage, the Kumbh Mela, every 12 years, where many families get separated from their loved ones, if Indian Bollywood movies are to be believed.

There are countless films where the script has two brothers getting lost in the melee of the Kumbh Mela during their childhood, who end up being raised by surrogate families — one turning out to be a judicious cop while the other becomes a robber. They grow up not knowing their bloodline and become sworn enemies, only to discover a common tattoo, piece of a broken pendent or a faded baby picture, that brings about the reconciliation, generally towards the finale of the show.

Personally, I never got a chance to visit Prayagraj, even in its old avatar of Allahabad. But like I mentioned earlier, I sent a lot of visitors there on my behalf, every few years or so.

“I’m going to India in February,” a posh lady told me in Mauritius recently.

“Visit Allahabad, sorry, Prayagraj,” I recommended.

“The place where Kumbh Mela is held?” she questioned.

“I want my three sons to see authentic Indian culture,” she gushed.

“O dear!” I exclaimed.

“Any precautions I should take?” she asked.

“Get their names tattooed on their wrists,” I advocated.

HELSINKI — What do you give the world’s most literate country for its 100th birthday? For Finland’s politicians and public, the answer was simple: a vast, state-of-the-art library, a new “living room for the nation”.

Twenty years in the planning, Helsinki’s central library officially opens on December 5 at the end of a year of festivities marking the centenary of Finland’s independence after breaking with Russia in 1917 following six centuries under Swedish rule.

It is a huge, flowing structure of wood and glass sitting on a prime spot in the city centre, directly opposite the Finnish parliament. 

But whereas the parliament building is an austere and imposing hunk of granite, the new library was designed by Finnish firm ALA Architects as a welcoming, undulating structure, clad in 160 kilometres’ worth of Finnish spruce, drawing people inside with a “warm hug”.

Named Oodi — “ode” in Finnish — it is intended as a paean to knowledge, learning and equality in what was ranked the world’s most literate country by a 2016 report based on official statistics.

As the grand opening approaches, workers are frantically trying to finish the outside of the building. Installing the flowing wood panelling has proven harder than expected in Helsinki’s freezing climate. 

The interior, however, is largely ready.

While books will feature heavily — 100,000 of them — the cutting-edge facility also boasts studios for music and video production, a cinema, and workshops containing 3D printers and laser cutters, all free of charge for the public.

It will also house an EU-funded visitor centre, offering information on the 28-member bloc’s work and its impact on people’s daily lives.

“Oodi gives a new modern idea of what it means to be a library,” Tommi Laitio, Helsinki’s executive director of culture and leisure, told AFP.

“It is a house of literature but it’s also a house of technology, it’s a house of music, it’s a house of cinema, it’s a house of the European Union. 

“And I think all of these come together to this idea of hope and progress,” Laitio said.

Robot librarians

One sign of such progress is the building’s fleet of book-carrying robots — small grey waggons which navigate themselves in and out of lifts, avoiding people and furniture, in order to bring returned books up from the basement and drop them off at the correct bookcase.

There, a human member of staff will place the books on the shelf.

Oodi’s planners believe the robot librarians are the first instance in the world of self-driving technology being used in this way inside a public library.

The robots will become a familiar sight to the library’s expected 10,000 visitors a day.

Silence is not golden

Oodi will have areas walled off for quiet studying, but for everywhere else, there will not be a “silence” rule in force, as is common in libraries.

In fact, making a mess and noise are positively encouraged inside the “nerd loft” — a place to inspire people of all ages to come together and create.

Users can build things in workshops equipped with cutting-edge tools, borrow musical instruments or play games consoles.

“We are prepared to constantly have discussions with the users and the staff about what behaviour is welcome in the library, but it’s definitely a place of noise and all sorts of improvised activities,” Helsinki’s head of library services, Katri Vanttinen, said.

She is particularly proud of the library’s decision not to separate the children’s section from the adult books. 

All are housed on the library’s panoramic top floor: a sweeping 50-metre long space, with glass walls on all sides supporting a billowing, cloudlike roof.

“We think that the noise the children bring into this floor is positive noise, we hear the future, and we enjoy that we have children’s and adult literature on the same floor with no walls in between,” Vanttinen said.

“Acoustics have been planned really well, so even if people are shouting at one end you can hardly hear them at the other end,” she added.

As vital as drinking water

Although many countries have been cutting back on library services, Laitio said there were no problems winning political and public backing for the 98-million-euro ($110-million) project, thanks to the value that many Finns place on libraries. 

Some 68 million books a year are borrowed by the country’s 5.5 million people, named the happiest in the world by the UN earlier this year.

“Libraries in Helsinki are the second highest-rated public service after drinking water,” Laitio said.

“So libraries are really loved in Finland. And if I look at this project, a 100-million-euro investment, I hear zero to minimal protest. Actually people are really joyful and proud.”