Body & Mind

Better Solar Helps Bitter Hops

- Adam Clare
beer

Agrivoltaic setups aren’t new to regular readers of this site as we’ve seen many times that certain crops benefit from the shade solar panels provide; and, the solar panels benefit the farmers by producing clean energy. Now we know that hops, which flavour beer, thrive under solar panels. A German experiment with a special solar setup for hops has proven more successful than expected since the hops fared better against disease.

Which crops thrive under solar panels depends on many factors, and for a crop like hops a default solar field setup is not a good one. Hops like to grow straight up which means that the solar panels need to be elevated high off the ground. The hops then grow up to the solar panels and get lots of benefit from the cooling effects of the panels themselves.

The pilot project — a collaboration between Wimmer and local solar technology company Hallertauer Handelshaus — was set up in the fall of last year. The electricity made at this farm can power around 250 households, and the hops get shade they’ll need more often as climate change turbocharges summer heat.

Solar panels atop crops has been gaining traction in recent years as incentives and demand for clean energy skyrocket. Researchers look into making the best use of agricultural land, and farmers seek ways to shield their crops from blistering heat, keep in moisture and potentially increase yields. The team in Germany says its effort is the first agrivoltaic project that’s solely focused on hops, but projects have sprouted around the world in several countries for a variety of grains, fruits and vegetables.

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Working Out Helps You Work it Out

- Adam Clare

run

Going for a walk can help you settle down your overactive brain and help you see things positively, and best of all it’s free! Anxiety and depression rates are increasing in North America for a variety of legitimate reasons; however, we a little working out can bring those rates down. A very effective treatment for anxiety and depression is to use your body and workout. There’s no a growing movement in the english speaking world to get medical professionals prescribe exercise as part of a treatment plan.

“Physical activity can be an effective treatment for mental health problems,” says Ben Singh, lead author and research fellow at the University of South Australia. He thinks it works in several ways: by releasing endorphins and boosting our mood, improving sleep, reducing stress, supporting self-esteem and confidence, and making us feel accomplished and purposeful.

The findings suggest that exercise is particularly helpful in certain situations. While the type of exercise didn’t matter, people got more mental health benefits out of higher-intensity exercise. If you’re doing something that makes you breathe hard, in other words, that’s a good sign.

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Transit Hub Addiction Clinics Benefit Everyone

- Adam Clare

When social services are difficult to get to then their services are used less, it sounds obvious but in too many places social services are very difficult to get to. Car centric urban designs further exacerbate inequality by limiting mobility options, or to put it another way: cars limit freedom of access and opportunities.

In order to best help everyone in our communities we should ensure that social services are accessible and what better way than at transit hubs? Many people suffering from addiction also suffer from economic problems so ensuring that they can easily get to treatment centres can help them recover. Early research is proving that accessible treatment centres help everyone.

“What we’re finding is that there’s this significant relationship between being close to these new transit start ups … and costs, operating costs are significantly less,” said Cohen.

“The other thing that we’re finding is that there’s a relationship between equity and access to treatment.”

The research looked at addiction and mental-health clinics that were within half-a-mile, or approximately 800 metres, of a new transit route. Cohen considered that basically walking distance, and compared results with those from clinics further afield.

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Crosswords Reduce Dementia Risk

- Adam Clare

We know that having friends can help with reducing risk of dementia in old age, but what do people with small (or nonexistent ) social circles do? They can take up leisure activities that get the brain working. Researchers in Australia have found that people who participate in active leisure are less likely to develop dementia. These activities include crosswords, woodworking, painting, and taking classes for fun.

They found that participants who routinely engaged in adult literacy and mental acuity tasks such as education classes, keeping journals, and doing crosswords were 9-11 percent less likely to develop dementia than their peers.

Creative hobbies like crafting, knitting and painting, and more passive activities like reading reduced the risk by 7 percent. In contrast, the size of someone’s social network and the frequency of external outings to the cinema or restaurant were not associated with dementia risk reduction.

The results remained statistically significant even when adjusted for earlier education level, and socioeconomic status. No significant variations were found between men and women.

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Will Kindergarteners be Better at Fact Checking than Boomers?

- Adam Clare

Argument analysis flowchart
Figure 1 from Cook, Ellerton, and Kinkead 2018. CC BY 3.0

We tach kids how to read so why not teach them to understand how to critique what they read? People tend to be fine with that (although some basic people claim schools shouldn’t teach kids how to question the world around them), so let’s take it the idea of literacy to the 21st century. In Finland they are teaching kindergarten students how to critique and understand arguments made in the news, social media, books, and even their teachers. It turns out that kids are really good at reasoning and will identify “fake news” when they see it.

We soon discovered that children enjoyed playing Sherlock Holmes when fact-checking the claims teachers gave them to verify. After some trial and error, the teachers building the curriculum boiled down complex fact-checking methods into three fundamental questions: Who’s behind the information? What’s the evidence? What do other sources say? These questions are folded in throughout the curriculum, across subjects, and there is continuity from year to year. Young children may learn to tell the difference between a mistake and a hoax, while older students may undertake more advanced projects on elections and threats to democracy.
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It would take a lot of time to copy the Finnish approach fully, but a host of experiments in the European Union and beyond suggest that the basic idea can be replicated. The European Commission Expert Group, on which I serve, has explored how education and training initiatives can tackle disinformation through digital literacy in schools throughout Europe. We have produced a report and practical guidelines for teachers and other educators on tackling disinformation, which include activity plans and insights on how to create student-centered approaches. One of the central challenges is that teachers need training, guidance, and support, as well as ways to measure the effectiveness of these lessons.

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