Want greater brain volume which can improve your memory and cognition? If you answered yes to this question, then look no further than beyond your house, as new research suggests that doing household chores can improve brain health in older adults.

“Scientists already know that exercise has a positive impact on the brain, but our study is the first to show that the same may be true for household chores,” says Noah Koblinsky, lead author of the study, Exercise Physiologist and Project Coordinator at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute (RRI).

“Understanding how different forms of physical activity contribute to brain health is crucial for developing strategies to reduce the risk of cognitive decline and dementia in older adults.”

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The researchers found that older adults who spent more time engaging in such activities had greater brain volume, regardless of how much exercise they did. This was observed in the hippocampus, which plays a major role in memory and learning, and the frontal lobe, which is involved in many aspects of cognition.

Good to know!

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And he’s not just playing for fun. He’s playing with them competitively (but it seems that he still can’t win against his human, at least in Connect Four).

Watch as Morty the Australian Shepherd grabs the Connect Four chips using his mouth, carefully removes a Jenga block, and rolls himself inside a blanket.

Morty’s humans are very attentive to Morty, training him to play board games and other incredible tricks.

Cool!

Via Laughing Squid

(Image Credit: aussie_morty/ Instagram)

When Chris Lerma received a message from his daughter asking him whether their family could get a duck, he did not respond with a yes or no. Instead, Lerma immediately jumped into what the duck’s name should be. He told his daughter that if the duck was a boy, it would be named Swan Solo; if it was a girl, then it would be named Amy Farrah Fowler. Unfortunately, his daughter rejected his punny name proposals, and so Lerma just responded with a cold, “Then no duck for you.”

But his daughter continued on begging, and so he responded with more name suggestions, until both of them came into an agreement.

Read their conversation on Facebook.

(Image Credit: Chris Lerma/ Facebook)

Age of Empires IV will finally be released this year, almost four years after the official announcement of the game. So prepare your spears, your bows, your arrows, and your swords and shields, as this fall, a new age is, once again, upon us.

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If you know someone who will get married this year, then you might want to encourage them to make the wedding more fun than it already is. How, you ask? By renting llamas, of course. And no, it’s not a joke. You really can rent a llama or an alpaca, thanks to Mtn Peaks Therapy Llamas & Alpacas.

Just look at how these newlyweds smile.

(Image Credit: Sad And Useless)

Cerberus is known in Greek mythology as this terrifying dog that guards the Underworld, one that you would not describe as a “good boy.” But what if Cerberus was not that scary? What if it is cute, like these three-headed Shiba Inu toys made by the Japanese company Qualia? I’d pet Cerberus if this was the case.

Borrowing their name from the mythical three-headed creature known as Cerberus (aka Kerberos), the Shibaberos collectible figures come in five different styles – one where the three heads are horizontal, one where they’re vertically-stacked, a wacky pyramid configuration, one that’s standing, and another that looks like the afterimage of a Shiba Inu shaking its head from side to side. They’re all equally weird and silly.

(Image Credit: Qualia/ Technabob/ Toy-People)

Just a few days ago, our world witnessed history, as the Ingenuity helicopter took off from Martian soil and hovered for about 30 seconds before coming back down on the ground. To some, this may not mean much, but for scientists, this event is a scientific breakthrough, for many reasons.

There are several technological challenges to conducting a helicopter flight on another world. First, and most significantly, helicopters need an atmosphere to fly.

The blades, or "rotors" of a helicopter must spin fast enough to generate a force called "lift." But lift can only be generated in the presence of some kind of atmosphere. While Mars does have an atmosphere, it's much, much thinner than Earth's — about 100 times thinner, in fact.

Flying Ingenuity in Mars' atmosphere is therefore the equivalent of flying a helicopter on Earth at a height of 100,000 feet. For reference, commercial aircraft fly between 30,000-40,000 feet above the Earth’s surface and the highest we’ve ever been in a helicopter on Earth is 42,000 feet.

More about this over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: NASA TV)

Taking risks is something that we learn as we grow older. As we live our lives, we learn that life is full of surprises, and from this lesson we learn to make better decisions, and we learn to weigh our choices in challenging situations. This is why risk-taking is an important ability that should be taught to every person as early as possible. The problem, however, is that, as children, we tend to fear the unknown and we grow to avoid risks. If that is the case, then how should we encourage children to take risks? It would seem that introducing chess to them could be an answer, according to this paper published in the Journal of Development Economics.

Playing chess has long been considered a game for those with good logical skills, but past research has also shown that good players must also be able to take risks when necessary—sacrificing a knight, for example, if it looks like a move that will ensure victory. In this new effort, the researchers wondered what sort of mental impact playing chess might have on people who play the game in their youth. To find, out, they enlisted 400 school children (ages 15 and 16) in the U.K. who had never played chess before and training them to play chess. Each child was then tested over a year to detect any changes in their cognitive abilities.

The researchers found that most of the children experienced a decrease in risk aversion in a variety of game playing scenarios. They also noticed that playing chess also led to better math scores for some of the students and improvements in logic or rational thinking.

Learn more about the study over at PHYS.org.

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Many were skeptical about advanced shoe technology affecting an athlete’s performance when Nike introduced the concept way back in 2017. But it seems that this technology really does affect the performance of athletes, according to a new paper published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. The paper found out that advanced shoe technology reduced running times of both male and female athletes.

The study analyzed seasonal best times for elite male and female runners in three race categories—10 kilometers, half marathon and marathon races—between 2012 and 2019. The researchers found a statistically significant decrease in race times after 2017, which coincided with the premiere of the Nike Vaporfly 4%.

Female elite athletes appeared to gain the most benefit from the design improvement, which features a thicker, lighter foam and rigid plate along the midsole. Their seasonal best times between 2016 and 2019 decreased anywhere from 1.7 to 2.3 percent, versus 0.6 to 1.5 percent for the men. For example, the new shoe technology improved female marathon time by about 2 minutes and 10 seconds, a 1.7 percent boost in performance.

"As far as chronometric performance is concerned, it is in our opinion a major advancement," said Dr. Stéphane Bermon, lead author of the paper and director of the World Athletics Health and Science Department.

A revolutionary tech indeed.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Upon its release, Ghost of Tsushima took the video game world by storm. While the game may not have won the Game of The Year award last year, people still praised it for its stunning graphics, great voice acting, and realistic combat. But if the combat is said to be realistic, then that means that it can be recreated in real life. But can it really be recreated? Turns out, the answer is yes, but you need to be a sword expert if you plan on doing this.

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Paweł Kałuziak is confident when he lets his dog Gucio go off leash as they walk along the wooded trail near their home in Poland. After all, they know this path well, and Gucio never strays far from him. But one day in Early February, something unexpected happened: Gucio did not return to Kałuziak.

When Gucio failed to appear after a few minutes, Kałuziak became concerned.

“He always comes back whenever I call to him,” Kałuziak told The Dodo. “But when I called his name, Gucio did not come back.”

Kałuziak continued to search all through the afternoon, but his dog was nowhere to be found.

For days, Kałuziak searched for Gucio, but to no avail. And then days turned into weeks, but Kałuziak did not give up.

Several weeks later after Gucio’s disappearance, a man walked his dog Diego in the same area where Kałuziak and Gucio walked. Suddenly, Diego tugged on his leash repeatedly, catching the attention of his owner. Diego then led his owner to a deep hole that was hidden in the landscape, and inside that hole was Gucio, tired and too weak to bark. Thanks to Diego, Gucio was found before it was too late.

All told, it’s believed that Gucio had been trapped in the hole for 32 days, surviving on melting snow. He’d grown very weak and thin, but it was nothing Gucio couldn’t overcome with the love of his family.

Read more about this heartwarming story over at The Dodo.

(Image Credit: Paweł Kałuziak/ The Dodo)

A mallard duckling raises its head as a tiny fly hovers above it. In another scene, a swallow can be seen flying through a window with broken glass, and the bird maneuvers its body to make sure that it won’t get hurt as it goes through the window. Meanwhile, a shag, probably searching for food, dives deep into the water.

These are just some of the best photos of the 2021 Bird Photographer of the Year Contest that Colossal has compiled. See more of these over at the site.

(Image Credit: Zdenek Jakl/ Colossal)

From afar, shards of ice seem to occupy the space inside the glass box. But as we come closer towards the glass box, we realize that these are not ice shards, but a sedge of tiny orizuru (paper cranes), with each orizuru having only about a centimeter wingspan. These miniature origami cranes are made by the Japanese artist Naoki Onogawa.

Orizuru typically are a symbol of peace. But for Onogawa, they hold a slightly different meaning: prayer. When the March 11th earthquake and tsunami struck the Tohoku region, Onogawa was still a student. But when he visited the Rikuzentakada area the following year, he was struck by the destruction and devastation. It was this experience that prompted the artist to begin making miniature paper cranes as a symbol of prayer.

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Naoki Onogawa is currently showing new works pictured here in an exhibition titled “folklore” at the Setouchi City Museum of Art. The exhibition is up through May 5, 2021 but you can also keep up with the artist on Instagram.

See more of Onogawa’s works over at Spoon & Tamago.

Amazing!

(Image Credit: Spoon & Tamago)

When Wawan Margono suddenly received gibberish messages from his girlfriend Mikayla, he thought that she went crazy and immediately checked up on her inside her room. But upon entering the room, what welcomed Wawan was not her girlfriend, but their cats who were sitting down on the keyboard of Mikayla’s laptop.

Obviously, the cats did not care about what they had done.

(Image Credit: Wawan BudiAwan Margono / The Meowed Club On Facebook)

Mice have been the number one go-to subjects of researchers when it comes to scientific experiments. However, when it comes to studies about mental illnesses, the lab mice are often sidelined, and it seems that we missed something really crucial in doing this.

A new study… shows there are important links between human and mouse minds in how they function -- and malfunction. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis devised a rigorous approach to study how hallucinations are produced in the brain, providing a promising entry point to the development of much-needed new therapies for schizophrenia.

The study, published April 2 in the journal Science, lays out a way to probe the biological roots of a defining symptom of psychosis: hallucinations. The researchers trained people and mice to complete a computer-based task that induced them to hear imaginary sounds. By analyzing performance of the task, the researchers were able to objectively measure hallucination-like events in people and mice. This innovative approach allowed them to study the neural circuits underlying hallucinations, opening up mental symptoms to the kind of scientific studies that have been so fruitful for diseases of other parts of the body.

Learn more about this study over at Science Daily.

(Image Credit: Aaron Logan/ Wikimedia Commons)