US To Recommend COVID-19 Boosters For Most Americans 8 Months After Full Vaccination

 US to recommend COVID - 19 boosters for most Americans 8 months after full vaccination

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is developing a plan to start offering coronavirus vaccine boosters to Americans eight months after completing their initial inoculations, and some Americans could begin receiving the shots as early as mid-September, The New York Times reported late Monday, citing sources familiar with the effort.

The administration’s decision could be announced as early as this week, with the highly transmissible delta variant, first detected in India, fueling the urgency of the booster rollout, the Times reported.

According to four people familiar with the decision, booster distribution would not occur until after an application from Pfizer-BioNTech for the additional shots is cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, The Washington Post reported.

Nursing home residents and health care workers are likely to receive the first available COVID-19 booster shots, followed by other older people near the front of the original vaccination line, the Times reported.

Officials envision giving people the same vaccine they originally received and have discussed launching the broader effort in October but have not settled on a timetable, the newspaper added.

According to the Post, just over 50% of Americans are currently fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, while millions of Americans remain firmly opposed to the measure.

The pending booster announcement is in stark contrast to public statements issued by senior officials in recent months indicating that it is far too soon to know if COVID-19 vaccine boosters are even needed, the Post reported, citing the following joint statement issued by the FDA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July:

“Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time.”

Meditation Can Improve Brain Connectivity In Just Eight Weeks (Even For Total Novices)

 

Meditation Can Improve Brain Connectivity In Just Eight Weeks (Even For Total Novices)

Meditation is … well, it’s tricky, scientifically speaking. Does it sharpen your mind, or simplify it? Keep you young, or take you to the edge of death? And most importantly of all, why do so many people who do it seem so smug?

Well, it turns out they may have a valid reason: according to a study published recently in the journal Science Reports, people who meditate may actually have quicker brains than the rest of us. The team behind the research found that meditation can improve your brain’s ability to quickly switch between two main states of consciousness – and the effect is noticeable in as little as eight weeks.

“Tibetans have a term for that ease of switching between states,” study co-author Dr George Weinschenk told Neuroscience News. “[T]hey call it mental pliancy, an ability that allows you to shape and mould your mind.”

The study followed ten university students who signed up for a meditation class taught by Weinschenk. They each underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan at the start of the course, and then again two months later. In the time between the scans, the students practised a type of meditation called “focused attention meditation” (FAM), in which the meditator focuses their attention on something – anything really: internal or external, “their breath, a point on the wall, a phrase, or anything else as they saw fit,” explains the paper. If their attention drifted, they would just bring the focus back to their chosen object, whatever it was. This was to be practised for at least 10 minutes, five times a week, with the experiences documented in a journal.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But just this small amount of practice produced some surprisingly dramatic results.

“The … study showed that 2-month meditation training increased brain functional connectivity, even when participants were not in a meditative state,” explains the paper. “These findings demonstrate that … meditation training has a significant impact on the brain functional connectivity but not on the brain structure. Therefore the observed changes in functional connectivity are solely functional changes and not related to structural changes.”

To understand what had happened, you need to know about the two general states of consciousness that the brain has access to. The first is the default main network or DMN. This (perhaps unsurprisingly) is the default state of the brain – it’s what’s going on in your head when you’re awake, but not really doing anything. It’s not that it’s never activated in other scenarios, but when you’re daydreaming, for instance, it’s the DMN that’s in charge.

The other is called the dorsal attention network, or DAN. This kicks into gear when you’re engaged in goal-directed behaviour, especially when it involves visualizing how objects work and interact. What the study found was that two months of meditation, even for novices, was enough to significantly increase connections between the two networks, as well as within the DAN and between the DMN and visual cortex.

“The findings indicate the potential effects of meditation on enhancing the brain capability of fast switching between mind wandering and focused attention and maintaining attention once inattentive state,” notes the paper.

Now, the study had some obvious limitations: it was a very small group, with no control group. What’s more, there was only one follow-up session, and the study itself only lasted a short time, so there’s no way of telling whether these results could be generalized over longer periods. But for study co-author Assistant Professor Weiying Dai, whose background is in neuroimaging and Alzheimer’s disease, the results open up exciting new possibilities for research.

“I’m thinking about an elderly study because this population was young students,” she told Neuroscience News. “I want to get a healthy elderly group, and then another group with early Alzheimer’s disease or mild cognitive impairment. I want to see whether the changes in the brain from meditation can enhance cognitive performance. I’m writing the proposal and trying to attract the funds in that direction.”

In an ancient, dried-up drinking well, a graveyard of rhinos, horses, and giraffes was discovered.

 Thousands of desperate giraffes, rhinos, horses, and sabertooth cats flocked to a watering hole in what is now Spain nine million years ago, first as a shelter, then as a final resting place.

According to new research published in a September issue of a journal and available online July 15, dozens of animals died of starvation, dehydration, and mired in the dwindling watering hole during three different periods of drought in the late Miocene. When the rains returned, the animals' remains were quickly covered in mud, largely undisturbed by scavengers or weathering.

They are exceptionally maintained, despite being almost 9 million years old," study leader David Martin-Perea, a palaeontologist at Madrid's National Natural Sciences Museum, stated. Martin-Perea and his colleagues discovered frog, mouse, and bird remnants, as well as two fetal horses, at the site.

A Miocene hotspot

The area south of what is now Madrid was a combination of woods and grassland throughout the late Miocene, with watering holes carved out of the underlying limestone and mudstone. Miners unearthed a wealth of bones in one of these old drinking holes in 2007.

Thousands of bones have been discovered buried over nine sites 19 miles (30 kilometres) west of Madrid since then, according to palaeontologists. One of those sites, Batallones-10, was the focus of the new study. Three unique layers of petrified bones have been discovered at the site, which was formerly a watering hole. There have been around 9,000 fossils discovered, representing dozens of species. Extinct horses, mastodons, rhinoceroses, musk deer, and cattle were among the 15 big creatures discovered in the mix.

Two species of sabertooth cats, a hyena related, a mustelid (a relative of modern-day weasels, badgers, and otters), and an ailurid were all carnivorous (an extinct relative of modern-day red pandas).

Death and drought

The presence of amphibians and tortoises at the site suggests that it once served as a wetland oasis in the surrounding grassland. The bones exhibited little evidence of predation, scavenging, or trampling, implying that they were buried promptly after the animals died.

A scientist  and his colleagues determined that drought was the cause of mortality after putting these indications together, as well as the fact that the animals died in three distinct times. The head of the team told the science journalists. 

This is a "classic example" of a drought-caused collection of fossils.

First, based on investigations of animal teeth that show specifics about what they were eating and drinking across time, the site is in an area that would have undergone periods of seasonal drought. Second, a large number of animals died in a short amount of time near a water source, and the fossils show that several species that would not ordinarily be found together gathered in one location, indicating that they were all hunting for moisture. Other geological signs, such as semi-arid mineral deposits, suggest that this was a drought-prone location.

The animals were also biased young, which makes sense in the context of drought: young animals have fewer reserves to depend on when times go difficult, and they are the first to die in modern drought observations, according to the researchers.

Many of these young kids most likely died of malnutrition rather than dehydration. As alternative sources of water became scarce, more animals flocked to the Batallones oasis. They would have chewed down the adjacent foliage until there was little forage left, as they were unwilling to travel far from this water source.

Some, weak from hunger and thirst, would have gone farther into the dwindling watering hole, only to get stuck in the mud. They would have drowned in shallow water if they had not been too weary to flee. During modern-day droughts, these types of miring deaths are common, according to the researchers. According to the experts, the die-offs occurred over for weeks or months.

Run-off from the surrounding land, which had been stripped of vegetation, would have filled the bottom of the watering hole once the rains returned, burying the buried animals in a layer of sediment and safeguarding their bodies.

Bones from animals that died along the shoreline would have washed down into the watering hole as well. Extremely delicate fossils, such as the two pregnant horses who perished together with their moms, were preserved thanks to the prompt burial.

The next stage, according to the head person of the team, is to dig even deeper. Similar sites nearby include deeper strata of predator-dominated fossils, and Ballatones-10 could still contain more sabertooth cats and other carnivores.

 

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