New Delhi, March 5 (IANS) Good energy plays a key role in bringing in positivity in your home. Try using sea salt, which helps in purifying the house and never keep any kind of heavy furniture in the centre of your house as it blocks off all the positive energy entering your house, says an expert.
Madhu Kotiya, spiritual healer at indiatarot.com, has shared tips to put away all the negativity from your home.
* Sea salt: This is a very commonly applied and tested formula to put away all the negativity from the house. It will purify your home and create a lot of fresh space. Sea salt can be used as it is or can be mixed with water and can be placed in different areas of your house. Make sure it is placed in North-east or South-west directions.
* Remove all the mess: All of us have the habit of piling up old stuff in drawers and bed boxes without realising that we are actually trapping all the negative energies inside the house. Throw away all that you don’t need anymore, be it old dirty clothes or old newspapers and magazines. Also, make your bed in the morning before you leave your house.
* Reschedule your furniture every now and then: Never keep any kind of heavy furniture in the centre of your house as it blocks off all the positive energy. Try keeping plants inside your house as it adds colour, life and bring in positive vibes .
* Avoid overcrowded walkways: Place small little things on the walkways, according to the area and space. Avoid large paintings or frames on that way.
* Meditation: Meditating once or twice a day in your living space will bring in positive vibes to your house.
Aggressive adults experience memory problems later in life
If you want to stay sane and not become forgetful in later life, keep calm and relax. A new study has revealed that young adults who are hostile or cope badly with stress are more likely to experience memory and thinking problems decades later.
The study found that people with the highest levels of hostile attitude and poor coping skill traits performed significantly worse on tests of thinking and memory skills 25 years later than people with the lowest levels of the traits.
“We may not think of our personality traits as having any bearing on how well we think or remember things, but we found that the effect of having a hostile attitude and poor coping skills on thinking ability was similar to the effect of more than a decade of aging,” said study author Lenore J. Launer from the American Academy of Neurology in the US.
The study, paper published in the online issue of journal Neurology, included 3,126 participants with the average age of 25.
For the analysis, participants were divided into four groups based on their level of hostility and effortful coping, and asked questions that measured their personalities and attitudes, and ability to cope with stress, memory and thinking abilities.
Cognitive abilities were measured again when they were at an average age of 50.
To measure hostility, the questions about personality assessed aggressive behaviour, a lack of trust for others and negative feelings associated with social relationships.
Another question looked at effortful coping, which was defined as actively trying to reduce stress despite repeated barriers to success.
The results showed that when people were asked to recall a list of 15 words, people with the most hostility in young adulthood remembered 0.16 fewer words in mid-life than people with the least hostility.
Those with the highest level of effortful coping remembered up to 0.30 fewer words than those with the lowest level of effortful coping.
“The study is observational. It does not prove that hostile attitudes and poor coping skills cause memory and thinking impairment; it only shows the association,” Launer noted.
Zika virus may infect, kill human brain stem cells
A Zika virus-laden mosquito bite may infect and kill a type of brain cell, vital for the development of the brain, says a new study conducted in lab grown human cells.
The infected stem cells then become the havens for the viral reproduction and thus result in complete cell death and or disruption of the cell growth, the study said.
“We are trying to fill the knowledge gap between the infection and potential neurological defects,” said first author Hengli Tang, virologist from the Florida State University in the US.
The study is important because it shows the mechanism by which the virus works in certain cells.
And knowing the mechanism of the virus could eventually allow researchers to design strategies to prevent the Zika virus from infecting different types of cells in the brain, the researchers explained.
“What we show is that the Zika virus infects neuronal cells in dish that are counterparts to those that form the cortex during human brain development. We still don’t know at all what is happening in the developing foetus,” said one of the researchers Hongjun Song, neuroscientist and stem cell biologist, at the Johns Hopkins University.
These findings may correlate with disrupted brain development, but direct evidence for a link between Zika virus and microcephaly is more likely to come from clinical studies, the researchers noted.
Babies born with microcephaly have underdeveloped brains and may face severe, lifelong developmental disabilities.
For the study, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the researchers used human stem cells that were engineered to produce cells similar to those that give rise to the brain’s cortex in human embryos.
As humans are typically infected by the Zika virus carried by mosquitoes, the scientists also grew the virus in mosquitoes to imitate a real-life scenario in which the virus is carried in a mosquito before infecting a human.
The researchers, then, applied the Zika virus to the lab-grown brain cells and found that the virus infected and spread through a plate of these cells within a span of three days. Also, it killed the cells or disrupted their growth.
