Walking slightly faster than usual can markedly enhance the health of seniors, according to new research from the University of Chicago.
Specifically, researchers discovered that frail or at-risk adults can bolster their health and quality of life by increasing their walking speed by at least 14 steps per minute over their normal pace.
“Increased walking speed is a well-documented protector against mortality,” stated Dr. Daniel Rubin, associate professor of anesthesia and critical care at the university, as reported by BBC Science Focus. “Older adults who walk more briskly tend to live longer.”
The study involved 102 participants from 14 retirement communities, implementing a structured walking program over four months.
During this period, 56 participants maintained a normal walking pace while the remaining 46 were encouraged to walk quickly yet safely.
At the conclusion of the program, each participant’s walking speed was assessed during a 6-minute walk.
While all participants reaped benefits from the walking program, those who managed around 100 steps per minute showed the most significant improvement in their frailty levels from the start to the end of the study.
Researchers had long recognized that walking speed correlates with the health of older adults, but previous recommendations on how to enhance pace were often subjective and challenging to quantify.
Traditionally, older adults were advised to walk at a pace where talking was easy but singing was difficult.
Frail adults are at increased risk of falls, hospitalization, and loss of independence. Warning signs include weakness, unintentional weight loss, and fatigue. Image Credit: Getty.
“We can offer the elderly straightforward and targeted advice like, ‘Try to walk five steps per minute faster than your normal pace.’
Healthcare providers and researchers can use wearable technology, such as accelerometers, to track walking speed. Rubin and his team are currently developing an app for individuals to measure their speed at home.
In the meantime, Rubin suggests utilizing a metronome to establish a baseline walking pace, syncing steps with the metronome’s beat.
“Once a comfortable pace is established, you can gradually add 5-10 steps per minute to enhance your cadence,” he noted. “The target is to aim for an increase of 10-15 steps per minute, which is acceptable.”
Nonetheless, Rubin emphasizes that seniors must walk safely and monitor for any symptoms such as chest pain, shortness of breath, or dizziness.
“Our hope is that older adults will find this a practical strategy for guiding walking intensity, enabling them to live longer and continue engaging in activities they enjoy,” he added.
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About our experts
Dr. Daniel Rubin is a physician at the University of Chicago and an assistant professor of anesthesia and critical care. His interest in gait studies stems from his clinical experience with elderly patients preparing for surgery.
Without human-induced climate change, the Earth could have been on track to enter another ice age within 11,000 years. This long-term prediction of the planet's “natural” climate is based on a new analysis of how orbital shapes and the tilt of their axis combine to change the amount of solar energy reaching Earth.
For millions of years, these orbital oscillations (known as the Milankovich cycle) entered and left the planet during the Ice Age about every 41,000 years. However, over the past 800,000 years, these ice ages, also known as ice age, have only occurred every 100,000 years. The term Ice Age, as it is currently, can be used to refer to whenever there is ice on Earth's poles, but generally refers to a wide range of ice Age periods.
The ambiguity of the record as the ice sheets were willingly retreated meant that it was not possible to explain how trajectory changes were involved in driving this long cycle.
If previous research attempted to link orbital changes to a specific period, such as onset of an ice age, Stephen Barker Cardiff University in England and his colleagues took a new tack. They came back fading during the “glacial age” where they saw the overall pattern of the ice age, also known as ice age. This allowed us to link changes in trajectories with changes in ice, despite the ambiguity of ice records over the past million years.
They discovered that these 100,000-year cycles appear to follow simple rules. For the last 900,000 years, following the most circular phase of the orbit, the planets also tilted towards the Sun, thus causing all interglacial periods after the Earth's axis wobbled at the farthest from the Sun.
This suggests that all three of these aspects of Earth's orbit (known as precession, oblique and eccentricity) are combined to create a 100,000-year glacial cycle, Barker says. “Since 900,000 years ago, this simple rule has predicted all of these major glacial end events, which says it's really very easy to predict,” he says.
Under that rule, the next ice age where you currently live is expected to begin approximately 66,000 years from the year, as there is no impact on greenhouse gas emissions. But that could only be started if there was an ice age before that,” says Barker.
The diagonal and gradual stages of precession that preceded the Holocene suggest that the glaciers are likely to be on track between 4300 and 11 and 100 years from now. We may now live in what would have been the beginning of this next ice age. “Of course, it's just a natural scenario,” says Barker.
More than 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide have been released into the atmosphere as the Industrial Revolution is expected to cause sufficient warming to disrupt this long-term glacial cycle.
“The amount we've already put into the atmosphere is so big that it takes hundreds to thousands of years to pull it out through natural processes,” Barker says. However, he says more research is needed to define the planet's future natural climate in a more detailed way.
It states that this is consistent with previous modeling suggesting that anthropogenic emissions can prevent the onset of the next ice age, from dozens to hundreds of thousands of years. Andrei Ganopolsky At the Potsdam Climate Impact Research Institute in Germany.
But he says even at pre-industrial levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, it was high enough to delay the ice sheet advancement by 50,000 years. This is due to the unusually small orbital changes expected in thousands of years and the unpredictable way that Earth responds to those changes.
○On a recent Sunday afternoon in Nairobi’s upscale neighborhood, Daniel Badu had his headphones wrapped around his head, his elbow resting on a pillow, and he was rapidly tapping on the screen of his cell phone.
Badu and his four teammates from the Ora 233 team, all wearing black and yellow kits, represented Ghana and Kenya’s Delta e in the final of the 1st Carry 1st Africa Cup, a continental tournament for first-person shooter videos. They were competing in the popular game “Call of Duty: Mobile”.
Esports events are on the rise in Kenya and other parts of Africa, due in part to increased access to the internet and devices such as smartphones, PCs, and gaming consoles. Popular titles include EA Sports FC, Call of Duty, and Tekken.
Daniel Badu aka Ruin of Ghana’s Aura 233 team at Carry1st Africa Cup Final. Photo: Edwin Ndeke/Guardian
To cater to the growing interest, professional teams, university leagues, national federations, and competitions such as the Carry1st Africa Cup have been established.
The trend is part of a growing interest in video games in general in Africa, which has one of the continent’s youngest populations. 2021 Report It said the number of video game consumers on the continent increased from 77 million to 186 million from 2015 to 2021.
Some of them have now moved on to professional gaming. Badu, known by the game’s alias Ruin, started playing Call of Duty: Mobile in 2019 after years of playing console games.
“I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember,” the 19-year-old said. Badu began his professional journey by joining various lower-tier teams to gain experience, showcase his skills, and make a name for himself. Last year, he was scouted by Ace Gamers Esports, a professional esports organization based in Accra, and signed a contract after a trial.
Ace Gamers also recruits, trains, and manages players for EA Sports FC, Apex Legends, Mortal Kombat, and other games. Badu said the contract gives him the opportunity to improve his game by playing with like-minded people and also gives him access to tournaments. “I have made it this far by playing the game and continuing to hone my game, so I can compete with the best players in Africa,” he said.
Spectators watch the Carry 1st Africa Cup Final at the Nairobi Game Development Center on November 24. Photo: Edwin Ndeke/Guardian
At the event in Nairobi, production staff sat behind large monitors selecting shots for the livestream. One floor below, the audience cheered and screamed as they watched the action unfold on television screens.
After seven months of qualifying events involving over 100 teams in Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa, six teams advanced to the two-day Carry1st Africa Cup finals, with South Africa’s Noxious Gaming ultimately Winning the championship (NxG).
“Large esports events are a great way to synergistically increase the attention of all gamers and drive interest from new gamers,” says Senior Community Manager at Carry1st, a pan-African games publisher headquartered in the Cape. said Dominion Eromosere, cum event leader. town.
Since its founding in 2018, the organization has hosted more than 400 tournaments, primarily through universities. Its online network, Tribe, attracts hundreds of thousands of gamers from across the continent.
Grassroots, national, and continental tournaments are becoming an important way to discover talent, hone player skills, and increase the popularity of esports. Other events taking place this year include the IESF Africa Esports Championship in Casablanca in August and the women-only Tekken Kongou Esports Championship in Kinshasa in November.
Members of the South African Noxious Gaming (NxG) team that won the inaugural Carry1st Africa Cup. Photo: Edwin Ndeke/Guardian
“The tournament breathes life into the ecosystem,” said Magdaline Mumbi, who finished fourth for Kenya at the Kinshasa Games. Mumbi, whose gaming nickname is Bambina, was a casual PlayStation gamer until six years ago when he competed in a Tekken tournament at a university event and came in second place.
From that point on, she began playing several games competitively while seeking mentorship in the Kenyan esports community. She made the leap by being selected for the national team to participate in the Dota 2 Battle Arena Games, a global Esports game, to be held in Turkey in 2022. “2022 allowed us to see a bigger picture of what esports is all about,” Mumbi said. “You can actually make money doing this.”
Magdaline Mumbi, aka Bambina, participated in the Kongo Esports Championship in Kinshasa in November. Photo: Magdaline Mumbi
For the African scene to further grow and compete in the global multi-billion dollar esports industry, it will need to overcome technological and financial challenges.
Poor internet infrastructure often results in poor connectivity. Also, because most games’ servers are hosted outside of Africa, there is often a delay between the device you play on and the server, an issue known as “high ping,” which can make intercontinental matches and matches between players from different African countries difficult.
“A lot of esports is rooted in online multiplayer gaming, and Africa doesn’t have the best infrastructure. [for this]” Badu said. “[African players] are at a huge disadvantage.”
Carry1st is working to address that issue. For the past two years, the company has partnered with game developers to help launch servers for Call of Duty: Mobile and tactical shooter Valorant in Africa.
Financially, it’s difficult to get player sponsorship, and above all, there are very few tournaments that pay out big bucks. The total prize money for the Nairobi tournament was $15,000. “Limited funding and sponsorship are hitting the field hard,” said Mumbi, who is also a chess instructor.
“If we can prove how entertaining e-sports is and how many people are watching it, people will invest in it,” Eromose said.
Humanoid robots that can drive cars may one day be used as chauffeurs, but their creators acknowledge that this could be at least 50 years away.
Most driverless cars work completely differently than a human driver, using artificial intelligence and custom mechanical systems to directly control the steering wheel and pedals. This approach is much more efficient and simpler than using a humanoid robot to drive, but it needs to be customized for each specific car.
Kento Kawarazuka Professor Takeru Sato of the University of Tokyo and his team have developed a humanoid robot called “Musashi” that can drive a car just like a human. Musashi has a human-like “skeleton” and “muscles,” and is equipped with cameras in both eyes and force sensors in its limbs. An artificial intelligence system determines the movements required to drive the car and responds to events such as changes in the color of traffic lights and people cutting in front of the car.
Currently, robots can only perform a limited range of driving tasks, such as going straight or turning right, at speeds of around 5km per hour on non-public roads. “The pedal speed and car speed are not high, and the car handling is also not as fast as a human,” Kawarazuka said.
Musashi is a humanoid robot that operates cars just like a human would.
Kento Kawarazuka et al. 2024
But Kawarazuka hopes that as the system is improved it could be used in any car, which could be useful when humanoid robots are routinely produced. “I’m not looking 10 or 20 years out, I’m looking 50 or 100 years out,” he says.
“This research could be of interest to people developing humanoid robots, but it doesn’t tell us much about autonomous driving.” Jack Stilgoe “Self-driving cars cannot and should not drive like humans. Because the technology doesn’t need to rely on limbs and eyes, it can rely on digital maps and dedicated infrastructure to find safer, more convenient ways to navigate the world,” say researchers at University College London.
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