Category: Body & Mind

Do What Norwegians do to Enjoy Winter

Winter can be tough for some people. If you are a person who feels down and out during the colder months there is an easy thing you can do to improve the season: change your attitude. Seriously. Recent research into how Norwegians relate to winter can help you in the times of snow.

Don’t deny the troubles of winter, instead, think about all the great things winter brings.

Changing your mindset can do more than distracting yourself from the weather.

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Most likely you can’t cross-country ski straight out of your house, and while Norwegian sweaters may be catching on, restaurants and coffee shops in more temperate climates don’t all feature the fireplaces and candles common to the far north. Still, there are little things non-Norwegians can do. “One of the things we do a lot of in the States is we bond by complaining about the winter,” says Leibowitz. “It’s hard to have a positive wintertime mindset when we make small talk by being negative about the winter.”

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Stop Worrying About Being Clean, Just be

We are obsessed with cleanliness in he developed world and it is likely killing us. The over use of cleaners in the built environment and the use of biochemical cleansers (like antibiotics) are weakening out immune system. They may also be negatively impacting our mental health as well. So relax with all that germaphobic behaviour.

Just chill. Killing microbes just because they microbes is not a nouns strategy for survival. We need exposure to all those tiny things to improve our health and out well being.

The overall message, then, is not that we should return to living in squalor as to try to embrace good bacteria; we need to be just as vigilant without our homes to keep them free from germs. Instead, Ilkka Hanski, a biologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, says, it’s important to get out of the house and spend time in woodlands and forests. “Let your children play in places where they have contact with soil and vegetation, which are rich in beneficial microbes,” he says. “If you have a house, don’t maintain a lawn, let native plants take over and grow taller. Cut them once or twice a year.”

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Kickstarter CEO Wants You to Have a New Job

Yancey Strickler is the CEO and cofounder of Kickstarter he sees the future of work and the economy different than most CEOs. Strickler sees a future with people working jobs that actually matter for causes that make the world a better a place. Instead of profit over people, we can have people who all profit.

He suggests many alternatives to the bland, “normal”, work life of 9-5 in a depressing office. You can work for a co-op, a charity, a benefit corporation, or do your own thing!

This is a talk about what happens when a culture is driven by the need for money to make more money.

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Don’t sell out your values, don’t sell out your community, don’t sell out the long term for the short term. Do something because you believe it’s wonderful and beneficial, not to get rich.

And — very important — if you plan to do something on an ongoing basis, ensure its sustainability. This means your work must support your operations and you don’t try to grow beyond that without careful planning. If you do those things you can easily maintain your independence.

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Human Waste as an Energy Source

Human waste is a problem for every place humans live and throughout history it has been dealt with in various ways. Instead of treating human waste as a problem that needs to be removed from our towns we may want to think about it as an energy source. That’s right: turn our poo into electricity.

Anaerobic digestion of human waste can be done to convert the waste into gas. The UN University has successfully done this in Uganda and ready to take it elsewhere.

Biogas from human waste, safely obtained under controlled circumstances using innovative technologies, is a potential fuel source great enough in theory to generate electricity for up to 138 million households – the number of households in Indonesia, Brazil, and Ethiopia combined.

A report today from UN University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health estimates that biogas potentially available from human waste worldwide would have a value of up to US$ 9.5 billion in natural gas equivalent.

And the residue, dried and charred, could produce 2 million tonnes of charcoal-equivalent fuel, curbing the destruction of trees.

Finally, experts say, the large energy value would prove small relative to that of the global health and environmental benefits that would accrue from the proper universal treatment of human waste.

“Rather than treating our waste as a major liability, with proper controls in place we can use it in several circumstances to build innovative and sustained financing for development while protecting health and improving our environment in the process,” according to the report, “Valuing Human Waste as an Energy Resource.”

Check out their work.

Cut Out Sugar and Improve Everything

Some new research points out by simply cutting out sugar one can improve basically all that ails them. In a recent research study children gave up sugar for nine days and found that much about their health improved. This implies that it might be more important to monitor one’s sugar intake more than one’s caloric intake for some aspects of increasing health.

“The whole goal was that they don’t lose weight when they switch over to the diet. It’s just they’re removing sugar to see what that effect will be,” explained Lin.

“They noticed everything got better.”

Blood pressure decreased, cholesterol decreased, liver function tests improved, and even fasting blood sugar and insulin levels in their bodies dropped.

“The freaky part of this study was that it was only nine days long,” Lin said.

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