Artists impression of the Terran 1 launch - courtesy of Relativity Space
Artists impression of the Terran 1 launch – courtesy of Relativity Space
A private space tech firm will become the first entity to launch a 3D-printed rocket, which is technically the largest 3D-printed object as well.
Totally reusable, the Terran 1 will launch today from the spaceport at Cape Canaveral at 1:00 PM US Eastern Time, and will be streamed live on this YouTube channel.
Built by Relativity Space, the company has huge ambitions for lowering the cost and emissions of spacefaring. This real-world test of Terran 1 features a rocket made with only 85% printed material, but future rockets will reach 95% and will include additive-manufactured boosters as well.
It’s a small payload rocket meant to economize small deliveries into space with all the wonderful cost reductions that come from reusability and 3D-printing.
A liquid oxygen propellant will act as the fuel, which would make it the first rocket ever to leave the atmosphere on natural gas fuels, and prove a key part of the company’s future missions to Mars which it hopes to power with methane.
Currently the rocket stands 110 feet tall and can carry 2,756 pounds (1,250 kilograms) into space, while the Terran R, a future project, will be much larger.
Relativity Space was started by former SpaceX and Blue Origin employees.
WATCH the live launch feed which kicks off noon EST…
Quote of the Day: “We should feel excited about the problems we confront. Solving them is one of the highest of all our brain functions.” – Robert Anton Wilson
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From Beijing, to Bognor Regis, to Buenos Aires, Sandy Hazelip and Ellie Hamby are sending a message to elderly around the world that goes, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
The 80-year-olds are going around the world in 80 days, like Phillias Fogg and Passepartout, to have advanced fun at their advanced age.
Hazelip and Hamby met in Zambia two decades ago during work in on the continent. Hazelip is a physician and Hamby a documentary photographer.
A friendship was bound to blossom, and they had already had several trips together before they got the idea to see all seven continents and all seven wonders of the world on a mission to celebrate their 80th birthdays by going around the world in 80 days.
“We don’t travel first class. And so when we have other ladies, especially who say, ‘Oh, I would love to travel with you two,’ the first thing I always do is look at their hands. If they are well-manicured, they do not want to travel with us,” Hazelip told CBS news.
Highlights from their trip so far include seeing the world from a plane above Mount Everest, and putting their foot down on Antarctica.
Their total itinerary is 18 countries, and they’ve already enjoyed a sled ride pulled by a dog team, seeing the Eternal City, the northern lights above Lapland, and a trek to see emperor penguins, despite the fact that they’ve both had total knee replacements.
“My daughter is not too concerned,” Hamby said. “She just says ‘Well, if Mom falls out of a hot air balloon in Egypt or off of the mountain… That’s fine. She’s living the life she wanted to live, and I’m happy for her.'”
Their motto is to always smile; never get upset, and they hope their trip will inspire other silver hairs to have a swan song trip like them rather than waste away in a char.
Keen to quit his day job, a West Virginian has built a quaint, beautifully furnished treehouse for Airbnb.
It will pair with his other, rather unorthodox listing, a cabin made out of a converted school bus.
A treehouse is without question one of the most fairy tale places to sleep, as an adult or certainly as a child. Will Sutherland always wanted to build one on his four-acre property in between two beautiful trees he found growing near the ledge of a large boulder subsumed by the landscape.
It took him six months, but with the promise of a hospitality-fueled mini-retirement, he managed it all by himself.
“I carried up every piece of wood, every piece of floor, the roof trusses, the floor trusses, and the big quad beam. I also sourced a bunch of cedar logs from a friend who was having a house built. I have a sawmill at my house so that I could mill all the cedar for the siding,” Sutherland told Business Insider.
When at first he pitched the idea of a treehouse Airbnb, his wife Sabrina said that as long as Will built a second bathroom, she was all in on the idea.
With his previous Airbnb, the “skoolie,” visitors had to enter the house to use their bathroom since there was none on the bus.
“Sabrina helped me with some of the details, like the floor finishing and trimming some boards. She was by my side every day when she got home from working as an arboretum specialist at the Virginia State Arboretum,” Will said.
The popularity of the school bus rental rose so fast that he increased the price to reflect the demand four separate times, going from just $39.00 a night to as much as $120.00. The treehouse is much the same, and Sutherland hauls in around $50,000 a year between the two.
Will and Sabrina basically live in a small community back in the woods, since the two places are booked almost year-round. Whenever Will has a spare moment he quickly mows the lawn and runs the sawmill that he relied on to build the treehouse to cut wood for himself and the guests.
The luxury outhouse which the guests of both rentals use has been rated a 5-star crapper, and the lack of flushing toilets and running showers right next to their bedroom has been a welcome change for the happily married couple who now have much more time to spend together now that Will has quit his day job.
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A new corridor measuring about 30 feet was discovered recently in the biggest of the three Giza Pyramids, the Pyramid of Khufu.
Images and videos were released to the public after the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities investigated the tunnel using an endoscopic camera.
Despite the nearly unlimited intrigue and mystery surrounding Ancient Egypt’s most remarkable engineering accomplishments, the tunnel has been quickly labeled as a method to disperse the weight of the sandstone blocks above.
One of the most iconic tourist attractions in the world, it seems mad to think there are still 30 feet or 9 meters of hidden passageway that were to be found inside, but it’s actually the second recently-discovered hidden passageway in Khufu’s pyramid, with an even longer 98-feet-long corridor being discovered in 2017.
Part of the reason why we’re enjoying these new insights is the work of an international team of researchers at the ScanPyramids project, which uses non-damaging, non-invasive thermography and cosmic-ray muon radiography to scan the pyramids for hidden secrets.
Near to the main entrance used by tourists today, the corridor’s whole purpose is not entirely known, in part because it seems to be unfinished.
“We’re going to continue our scanning so we will see what we can do… to figure out what we can find out beneath it, or just by the end of this corridor,” Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities told reporters after a press conference in front of the pyramid.
Built in the year 2,560 BCE, the pyramids were long thought to be tombs. Additional research mostly by archaeologists and archaeo-astronomers that tend to be unfavored by Egyptian authorities, suggests there would have been a much broader array of purposes, including as a measuring stick for Earth’s mass and a calculatory instrument for the movement of the stars and planets.
The latter theory is dismissed as sensational, but the pyramids are nothing if not sensational, and a lot of the geometry of Khufu’s pyramid corresponds to astronomical phenomena important to the Ancient Egyptians, who in any case made tombs in several other styles far more often than pyramidal.
Scan Pyramids has announced they are going to continue their work on the new passage as well as trying to find other ones.
WATCH the ScanPyramid presentation below…
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Blossom the lovesick goose – credit CBS News, retrieved from YouTube.
A cemetery manager played Valentine’s Day matchmaker to a lonely widowed goose whose mate passed away.
Blossom and Bud lived together for years in the pond at Riverside Cemetery in Marshalltown Iowa, but after Bud died last August, it seemed Blossom would spend the best years of her life alone.
General manager Dorie Tammen noticed that Blossom would spend hours staring at herself in the shiny reflections of model tombstones by the cemetery office, and she realized her goose needed company.
Tammen posted a personal ad on Facebook for a “lovely widowed goose” that was “youthful, adventurous, and lively,” looking for “a life partner for companionship and occasional shenanigans.”
The ad, mostly a joke, worked like a charm, and Tammen received a surprising email from Deb and Randy Hoyt who had a widower goose named Frankie who was in the same sort of heartbroken rut.
The Hoyts told CBS news that when they saw the ad for Blossom they thought “well that’d be great.”
The three humans set up a Valentine’s Day date for the two geese, and soon enough they were swimming around the pond at Riverside, seemingly content to be together forever.
Quote of the Day: “Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.” – E. B. White
Photo by: Devon Christopher Adams, CC license
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The last 100 million years of continental movement have recently been calculated by scientists and illustrated in a 23-second video, down to an astonishing 10-kilometer resolution.
The short .gif explains so much of how our world came to be in such a short time span, most notably how Africa has changed over time.
There are certain concepts at the bedrock of our geographical understanding of why the globe looks the way it does, for example, that the Indian subcontinent is on a slow-motion collision course with the Eurasian continent, and that this created the Himalayas.
However, it’s difficult to imagine these massive, literally world-changing events simply by looking at a static 2D image of the Earth.
“If you look for a continuous model of the interplay between river basins, global-scale erosion, and sediment deposition at high resolution for the past 100 million years, it just doesn’t exist,” said lead author of a paper presenting the video, Dr. Tristan Salles of the University of Sydney.
Salles’ model and illustration not only take into account continental drift and plate tectonics, but sediment deposition, erosion, and other geologic and hydrologic forces as well.
In the second part of the video illustration, the blue shades on the continents show the rates of sediment deposition contrasted with erosion, and total discharge of river flows as a way to help scientists and students comprehend how water changes the shape of the globe.
“So, this is a big advance. It’s not only a tool to help us investigate the past but will help scientists understand and predict the future.”
The first part measures how the movement of the continents changes the elevation of global topography. Take a look here at the changing shape of Africa, notably how West Africa is an early addition.
Also key to the evolution of that part of the world is the tugging of what would become the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula away from the central African basin, a phenomenon that formed the Great Rift Valley with its glorious volcanic features we see today.
The land paths this event created allowed one to travel overland from the farthest tip of Asia to the bottom of Africa—a change which if it did not take place, would have left North and South America unpopulated by Homo sapiens.
When a woman struck up a conversation with an Ontario homeless man, she didn’t imagine it would change his life forever.
After it became clear that Brian Bannister was a kind soul who had simply fallen on hard times, Danielle MacDuff offered him a job on her farm.
Bannister was living in a shed after a terribly challenging life that involved childhood trauma, overcoming addiction, and the death of his first wife, followed by the death of his second.
He said he had “given up,” but MacDuff’s offer revivified the man and brought the farm a pair of hands that are diligent at work and gentle with MacDuff’s children and her animals.
“It floored me. It just came from the heart with her and [I’ve] got to thank her every day,” Bannister told CTV News Toronto with tears in his eyes, who added he used to do farm work about 40 years ago.
Every day he gets a ride to the farm where he helps MacDuff’s family care for 200 animals including goats, cows, and horses.
The friendship that grew over time between the two Ontarians led MacDuff to set up a GoFundMe to help Brian get back on his feet, which raised nearly CAD$10,000 and was able to help him get his first shave and a haircut in two years as well as a new phone.
Brian Bannister gets a haircut (Facebook)
MacDuff also helped organize some provincial financial support for Bannister.
“He has no idea what this has done for me,“ MacDuff said. “If we could get everyone off the street ideally that would be my one wish, but it takes a lot of people to come together and that is what has happened for Brian. I think that’s why we’ve come so far in such a short time.”
Navin Chandra and his apartment building –The Better India / YouTube
Navin Chandra and his apartment building –The Better India / YouTube
A 92-year-old Mumbai man took action to transform his housing society with renewable energy and rainwater catches, saving the residents thousands.
In the year 2000, Navin Chandra moved into the Sealine Housing Society but was “appalled” to see how much money residents paid for the delivery of water from large tanker trucks.
Expensive and “not even clean” the truck water orders made no sense to Chandra considering that Mumbai lies right in the path of the mighty monsoon rains.
He convinced every member of the housing society to invest in a rainwater harvesting facility, solar panels, a windmill, and a composting pit, all in order to transform the unassuming apartment block into a hub of green civic-mindedness.
Part of Chandra’s pitch was that the residents would recover their investment in a few years thanks to water and electricity savings, and by 2012 the community was in the green, financially speaking, thanks to nearly 200,000 liters of water (2 lakh) gathered up by their rainwater system every monsoon season.
“We have stopped purchasing tank water, and can even fulfill the water needs of our neighboring buildings,” Chandra told The Better India.
Chandra didn’t stop at water bills but tackled the high electricity costs that also come along in the rainy season by installing solar panels and a wind turbine, providing the building with 50% of its electricity needs from nature.
Food scraps are composted on site which they use as fertilizer for the landscaping, including a rooftop garden.
In today’s frenzy of climate activism, too many people focus on trying to change the world rather than first changing their own environments.
If there were a Navin Chandra for every homeowner’s association, the world would look an awful lot more renewable than it does at the annual COP climate summits for example.
WATCH the story below from Better India…
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A Connect Airlines 75 ATR 72-600 Regional Aircraft with a Universal Hydrogen engine - Released
A Connect Airlines ATR 72-600 Regional Aircraft with a Universal Hydrogen engine – Released
A fledgling energy company looking to develop true zero-emissions aircraft just took a massive leap forward with the first-ever regional passenger flight powered principally on hydrogen.
A 40-seat aircraft took off at 8:41 am from Grant County International Airport and flew for 15 minutes, reaching an altitude of 3,500 MSL.
The flight, conducted under an FAA Special Airworthiness Certificate, was the first in a two-year flight test campaign expected to culminate in 2025 with entry into passenger service of ATR 72 regional aircraft converted to run on hydrogen.
Representatives from an equally-fledgling airline looking to develop a smarter travel experience were there to oversee their own aircraft.
“Today will go down in the history books as the true start to the decarbonization of the global airline industry and we at Connect Airlines are extremely proud of the role that we, as the first US operator, will play in leading the way with Universal Hydrogen,” said John Thomas, CEO of Connect Airlines.
For safety, only one of the ATR 72-600’s engines was replaced with Universal Hydrogen’s megawatt-class hydrogen fuel cell powertrains for safety purposes. The technology is not adapted, but rather purpose-built for aviation.
The energy generated by the burning of hydrogen feeds directly into the electric motor. This means there are no batteries onboard which drastically cuts down on costs and weight.
“Our business model resolves the chicken-and-egg problem between hydrogen airplanes and hydrogen infrastructure by developing both in parallel and with a uniquely low-cost approach,” said Paul Eremenko, co-founder and CEO of Universal Hydrogen.
“The airplanes are converted to hydrogen using an aftermarket retrofit conversion kit, tackling the existing fleet rather than developing a brand new airplane. And hydrogen fueling uses modular capsules compatible with existing freight networks and airport cargo handling equipment, making every airport in the world hydrogen-ready.”
Worldwide air travel accounts for about 2.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrogen fuel is theorized as one of two possible ways to decarbonize it, with the other being biofuels.
CURIOUS how it works? Watch the video below…
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Quote of the Day: “When you doubt, abstain.” – Ambrose Bierce
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This system consists of a pair of galaxies, dubbed IC 694 and NGC 3690, which made a close pass some 700 million years ago. As a result of this interaction, the system underwent a fierce burst of star formation. In the last fifteen years or so six supernovae have popped off in the outer reaches of the galaxy, making this system a distinguished supernova factory. Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University) – CC BY 4.0
A supermassive black hole discovered at the edge of the universe is one of the biggest ever detected, containing over a billion solar masses worth of interstellar dust and forming stars 1,000 times faster than our own Milky Way.
The cosmic colossus lies at the center of an extreme galaxy and dates back more than 13 billion years—just 750 million years after the Big Bang.
“This is something others have been predicting for a few years now, and it’s really nice to see the first direct observational evidence supporting this scenario,” said lead author Dr. Ryan Endsley, of The University of Texas at Austin.
“These results suggest very early supermassive black holes were often heavily obscured by dust, perhaps as a consequence of the intense star formation activity in their host galaxies.
The discovery, described online in the Royal Astronomical Society, could help answer one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy: how supermassive black holes in space evolved. It may even be a ‘missing link’ between galaxies that produce lots of stars like our Sun and the first supermassive black holes.
The American team made the discovery using data collected by ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array), a radio observatory in the Chilean Andes Mountains.
The galaxy, nicknamed COS-87259, was shining bright from the intense burst of star formation. The primordial black hole is heavily enshrouded by cosmic ‘dust’, causing nearly all of its light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Its active galactic nucleus is generating a strong jet of material moving close to the speed of light.
Black holes that have masses millions-to-billions of times greater than our own Sun, are sitting at the center of nearly every galaxy.
The pull of gravity is so strong that even light can’t escape it. This is what makes them invisible.
Several have been detected that were created when the universe was very young. Their light takes so long to reach us that we see them as they existed back in the distant past—in this case, approximately five percent of the current age of the universe.
What is particularly astonishing about the new black hole is it was identified over a relatively small patch of the sky. This suggests there could be thousands of similar black holes in the very early universe, which was completely unexpected from previous data.
The only other class of supermassive black holes we knew about in the very early universe are quasars, which are powered by black holes that give off large amounts of light and energy, relatively unobscured by cosmic dust.
They are extremely rare, with only a few located over the full sky.
“While nobody expected to find this kind of object in the very early Universe, its discovery takes a step towards building a much better understanding of how billion solar mass black holes were able to form so early on in the lifetime of the Universe, as well how the most massive galaxies first evolved,” added Dr. Endsley.
70-year-old Virginia Hanley staging her one-woman protest – SWNS
A disabled, nature-loving grandmother staged a one-woman protest to get a stay of execution for a healthy willow tree about to be chopped down.
Workers arrived in the neighborhood on Tuesday, where Virginia Hanley has lived since 2007.
When she looked out the window, she was shocked to see workers preparing to chop the tree down, after the local Council decided to remove the 61-year-old willow due to issues at a nearby property.
The Englishwoman from Minster in Sheppey, Kent, said they were under orders from Swale Borough Council and the tree was set to be gone in four hours.
“I replied saying ‘oh, so I’ve got four hours to try and sort this out?’ and he said, ‘oh no, I’m starting it now’”.
Grabbing her walking stick, a chair, and quilt, the 70-year-old bundled up for the cold and planted herself at the foot of the tree.
The act of defiance was no easy feat, as she was living with nerve malfunction following a road accident decades ago that left her unable to walk for long distances.
“While I was under the tree the workers told me they couldn’t wait while I was there because it was costing them money, so they left and they promised me they wouldn’t be back. But 15 minutes later, they were.
“I told them that I wasn’t going anywhere and that I wanted to know why this tree is coming down.”
Ms. Hanley was told that the Council assumed the willow had caused a neighbor’s porch and house to subside after their insurance company inspected the property and blamed the tree.
But Virginia’s home had experienced the same phenomenon and, she explained in a video below, when experts dug up her home they said it wasn’t the willow tree.
“So the chances of them having a willow tree problem and me not having one seemed odd to me.”
The US Geological Survey says land subsidence, which is a gradual settling (or sudden sinking) of the Earth’s surface, is principally caused by aquifer-system compaction, drainage of organic soils, underground mining, hydro-compaction, natural compaction, sinkholes, and thawing permafrost.
Hanley’s neighbor, who has lived in his home for 25 years, said, “My insurance company, Direct Line, dug up my front garden to confirm it is the tree that is causing the subsidence.
“I don’t know what all this rubbish is about with her trying to save the tree. I can’t understand why she is worrying about a poxy tree, it’s like flogging a dead horse.
“I called the council and they told me on the phone that the tree is on their property and she has no right to sit under their trees.”
But, thanks to Virginia, at the moment the old willow is still standing.
“There are three beautiful trees by my home which make living here a pleasure. They make it look nice, and trees are essential, essential for our well being.
“We all know that, everybody knows that, SBC knows that. Those trees have been here since 1962, when this bungalow was built.
A Swale council spokesman confirmed that despite the protest they believe it is necessary for the willow to be taken down.
“Unfortunately, we have had to take the decision to fell this tree. This is not a decision we have taken lightly, and only after we have investigated the issue thoroughly, including root analysis reports which highlighted the tree’s impact on the property.
“In these situations, we do aim to replace any felled trees where practical, and we will review this location for suitability once the felling work has been completed.”
This is the incredible moment a missing backcountry skier buried under snow was able to wave down a rescue chopper with only his one arm sticking out.
The video, shot by paramedic Mathieu Lambert, shows the man desperately waving with his only free limb as the helicopter hovered above, while shining a light on the mountain.
The young man, who has not been named, had been ski touring in the Lidairdes region of Switzerland when an avalanche hit.
His family alerted rescue services when he didn’t return on time.
Air Glaciers, a rescue and transport company, received the alert at 5:41 pm on February 8 and dispatched a helicopter with a paramedic and two rescue guides.
After checking the parking lot where the man had started his journey to ensure that he had not returned to his car, the team began flying over the route he had provided his family.
The team eventually located visible ski tracks and one of the guides was dropped off to trace them.
A leading cardiologist has revealed the top 10 heart symptoms you should never ignore—including nausea with chest ache and being tired upon waking. But a recent survey found 54 percent of adults wouldn’t guess these symptoms were related to poor heart health.
Dr. Ameet Bakhai, a consultant cardiologist at Spire Bushey Hospital in North London, listed other signs that could indicate your heart is in less than tip-top condition, including heaviness in the arm upon exertion, shortness of breath walking up stairs, and frequent extra or missed heartbeats.
Difficulty bending down and standing up, feeling dizzy when standing up quickly, and swollen legs are also indicators that your heart is not adapting to your positions, or is holding spare fluid in the body and needs attention.
Half of the 2,000 British adults surveyed reported they have suffered at least one of these symptoms before.
Bakhai, who has a special interest in how lifestyle factors can impact cardiac health says an adult with a healthy heart should be able to run up two flights of stairs without getting out of breath and squat on a toilet, providing they have no other health conditions.
Similarly, a healthy adult should be able to hold their breath comfortably for 20 seconds.
“We often ignore our heart health and it’s signals until it’s too late,” said Bakhai, who has been advising Healthspan, which commissioned the poll, about their Love Your Heart supplements in the UK.
“There’s no annual measurements, observations or tests (MOT) to be passed for most of us, so we ignore the small signals that our own engine is not performing ideally.
“Heart issues can often get progressively worse, until one day you have a more complicated issue – that could have been avoided if you’d heeded the warning signs.
“Heart issues can be connected to other things – you might consider not being able to run up two flights of stairs more of a lung condition or a lack of fitness or of weight gain, but there is a lot of overlap with coronary artery disease or heart valve problems or irregular heart rhythms.
That’s why looking after your heart health is essential.
The poll also found one in five adults have reported feeling dizzy after standing up too quickly, while 11 percent have experienced chest tightness.
But a third think such symptoms could be from a number of different things, while 26 percent just didn’t see them as serious. 17 percent didn’t raise these issues with other people because they didn’t want to be seen as melodramatic—and 13 percent consider themselves simply too young to have heart issues.
Bakhai explained, “This is sadly a misunderstanding as heart disease can affect people of all ages, particularly in the era of COVID, as the virus can attack the heart lining as a condition called myopericarditis (inflamed heart and heart covering).
“Warning signs like chest tightness, aches in your arms or jaw, dizziness on standing, breathlessness with bending down should act like a wake-up call that your heart is calling out for help.
A quarter of those polled said they had medical conditions, such as high blood pressure, while 20 percent said they had high cholesterol.
72 percent of those surveyed by OnePoll had never seen a medical professional about heart conditions, although 68 percent consider heart health very important to them, rising to 80 percent of those aged over 65. Around half admitted they need to do more to keep their hearts in good working condition.
10 HEART HEALTH SYMPTOMS
Dizziness on standing up quickly
Shortness of breath
Difficulty bending down
Palpitations
Tightness of the chest
Arm pain – often on the left
Difficulty standing up
Chest discomfort (excluding tightness)
Swollen legs
Frequent extra or skipped heartbeats
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Quote of the Day: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.” –Mary Oliver
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Saniah Poindexter with her son Kayden at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital – SWNS
“He’s defied the odds. He’s doing really great, despite us being told differently,” said Saniah, who studies business management at Grand Rapids Community College.
“Bringing him home was the happiest day of my life.”
An astronaut snapped a jaw-dropping picture of this week’s aurora borealis from space.
NASA’s Josh Cassada captured the light display aboard the International Space Station (ISS), while it was 250 miles from Earth.
Seemingly at a loss for words, the Minnesota-born physicist and US Navy test pilot commented on Tuesday, calling it “absolutely unreal”.
An aurora is a natural light display in Earth’s sky, predominantly seen in high-latitude regions around the Arctic and Antarctic.
They are the result of disturbances in the magnetosphere caused by the solar wind.
Auroras display moving patterns of brilliant lights that appear as curtains, rays, spirals, or dynamic flickers covering the entire sky—the way only a photo like Josh’s can portray.
Taking vitamin D supplements may help ward off dementia, according to a new, large-scale study with 12,388 participants who were dementia-free when they signed up.
To examine the vitamin’s association for participants with a mean age of 71, researchers at the University of Calgary’s Brain Institute in Canada and the University of Exeter in the UK partnered with the US National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center.
Of the group, 37 percent (4,637) took vitamin D supplements.
The team found that it was associated with 40 percent fewer dementia diagnoses in the group who took supplements.
Across the entire sample, 2,696 participants progressed to dementia over ten years; amongst them, 2,017 (75%) had no exposure to vitamin D throughout all visits prior to dementia diagnosis, and 679 (25%) had baseline exposure.
They also found the vitamin linked to living dementia-free for longer periods.
Professor Zahinoor Ismail, of the University of Calgary and University of Exeter, who led the research, said, “We know that vitamin D has some effects in the brain that could have implications for reducing dementia, however so far, research has yielded conflicting results.
“Our findings give key insights into groups who might be specifically targeted for vitamin D supplementation. Overall, we found evidence to suggest that earlier supplementation might be particularly beneficial, before the onset of cognitive decline.”
While Vitamin D was effective in all groups, the team found that effects were significantly greater in females, compared to males.
Previous research has found that insufficient levels of vitamin D are linked to higher dementia risk. Vitamin D is involved in the clearance of amyloid in the brain, the accumulation of which is one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Studies have also found that vitamin D may provide help to protect the brain against build-up of tau, another protein involved in the development of dementia.
The effects of vitamin D were also significantly greater in people who did not carry the APOEe4 gene, known to present a higher risk for Alzheimer’s dementia, compared to non-carriers. The authors suggest that people who carry the APOEe4 gene absorb vitamin D better from their intestine, which might reduce the vitamin D supplementation effect. However, no blood levels were drawn to test this hypothesis.
“We now need clinical trials to confirm whether this is really the case,” said Exeter’s Dr. Byron Creese, who co-authored the study published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring. “The ongoing VitaMIND study at the University of Exeter is exploring this issue further by randomly assigning participants to either take vitamin D or placebo and examining changes in memory and thinking tests over time.”
The VitaMIND study is run via PROTECT, an online study open to people aged 40 and over. In PROTECT annual questionnaires on detailed lifestyle factors combine with cognitive testing, to determine what keeps the brain sharp in later life. To find out more or to sign up, visit their website. In Canada, the associated CAN-PROTECT study on aging, in people over 40 additionally focus on caregiving in dementia.
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