1. Singing or Playing Music Throughout Life is Linked with Better Brain Health While You Age
Playing a musical instrument has obvious rewards: the sense of fun and enjoyment, the ability to express feelings in different ways, and the satisfaction experienced as proficiency improves, but could it actually be making you smarter?
Well, scientists working on PROTECT, an online study open to people aged 40 and over, reviewed data from more than a thousand adults to see the effect of playing a musical instrument or singing on brain health, and what they found was that, apart from any benefits it has for emotional wellbeing, it actually improved the memory and cognitive speed of the 40-and-ups.
Over 25,000 people have signed up for the PROTECT study, which has been running for 10 years, and in order to come up with this exciting finding the team reviewed participants’ musical experience and lifetime exposure to music, alongside results of cognitive testing, to determine whether musicality helps to keep the brain sharp in later life.
2. Explorers Think They’ve Found Amelia Earhart’s Long-Lost Airplane After Using Undersea Sonar
The mystery behind the disappearance of Amelia Earhart over the Pacific Ocean has fascinated people for years. But after a recent deep-sea sonar survey, some closure to the final chapter of her life may be forthcoming.
87 years after her disappearance, Deep Sea Vision, an ocean exploration company based in Charleston, South Carolina, claims to have found something that could be the wreckage of her plane.
16,000 feet (4,877 meters) below the sea, an anomaly that the company believes could be the Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft she was piloting, appeared on their screens.
3. 82% of U.S. Adults Are Hopeful About Their Own Future and Their Community’s Future
The United States has a reputation for being a hopeful nation, and a new survey indicates this optimistic outlook is still as American as apple pie.
The results revealed a whopping 82% of Americans are currently hopeful about their own futures. An even larger portion, 85 percent, are hopeful about the future of their family.
Three in four respondents also felt hopeful about the future of their local community, according the Human Flourishing Lab, a program from the Archbridge Institute.
One of the takeaways: Hopefulness is felt across all demographic groups, with three-quarters (or more) of Americans in every gender, age, household income, and racial or ethnic group expressing hope for their own future and the future of their family.
