Health
Finding good health news amidst a pandemic can be quite daunting. That’s not the case with The Optimist Daily, where positive news is in high supply. Our Health section covers the latest good news from the health sector, featuring solutions ranging from mental and physical health to immunity, nutrition, and cutting edge medical research.
Research shows that we’re not victims of our genes
According to the dominant view in medicine whatever happens to our health is a consequence of the genes we received at birth. This so-called “genetic determinism” means we don’t create our own lives. We are victims of our genes. That’s a rather depressing perspective that aligns with the Read More...
Yoga prevents heart disease
Yesterday we reported that yoga along with meditation might play a role in keeping you healthy during cancer treatment. Now a study has been released that says yoga might help protect against heart disease—especially if you can’t do more rigorous exercises. Dutch researchers reviewed some 37 Read More...
Mind control can change DNA and prevent disease
The disconnect between our minds and bodies is unfounded, one impacts the other and vice versa. A new study found that meditation keeps telomeres intact. Telomeres are basically caps on the end of our DNA that keep them from unraveling, they don’t cause a disease directly but are found to be Read More...
Feeling younger means living longer
It makes sense to fool yourself. New research shows that feeling young actually makes your body age slower. A British study found that seniors who felt at least three years younger in age had a lower chance of dying over an eight year period than those who felt their age or older. The study also Read More...
Mushrooms or plastic? An unlikely solution to pollution
Could poisonous plastic turn into a healthy food? A Dutch design studio has announced a prototyped incubator that grows oyster mushrooms—and other fungi—on plastic. The current design takes months to grow mushrooms and decompose plastic, but researchers believe that expediting the growth time Read More...
Researchers get closer to Alzheimer’s cure
Researchers at Stanford University have discovered what causes Alzheimer’s—potentially leading to a cure. The scientists noticed that disease sets in when a particular type of cell in the brain, called microglia, stops working. Microglia clean your brain, they keep out viruses and prevent Read More...
Laughing drives depression away
It might seem like a silly headline, but nitrous oxide—the same laughing gas used to ease pain and anxiety at the dentist—can be used to treat people with clinical depression. A new study had two groups of participants inhale gasses, one inhaled nitrous oxide, the other group inhaled a placebo. Read More...
Crowd-sourced seizure prediction breakthrough
A crowd-sourced online contest for data scientists has come up with a seizure-predicting model that accurately predicts seizures 82 percent of the time. Seizures impact about one percent of the population, and are described as electrical storms that take place in the brain. Earlier models did Read More...
Organic farming can feed the world
One of the main arguments against organic farming is the harvest numbers. It’s a widely held belief that without using chemicals to grow your food there’s no way of keeping bugs from eating at least a portion of your crop, so organic farms must have crop yields substantially lower than chemical Read More...
Salt-water greenhouses could lead to desert farming
Sweet water is scarce and the agriculture to produce our food uses most of it. So this is a really helpful innovation: A greenhouse that uses salt water—without the need for desalination. The project is a greenhouse made out of a cardboard-like material that has thousands of tiny holes in it. Read More...