#t t Rangarajan

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 36, 2024

Auditory Competition and Coding of Relative Stimulus Strength across Midbrain Space Maps of Barn Owls. Bae, A. J., Ferger, R., & Peña, J. L. (2024). Journal of Neuroscience, 44(21), e2081232024.

Volatile working memory representations crystallize with practice. Bellafard, A., Namvar, G., Kao, J. C., Vaziri, A., & Golshani, P. (2024). Nature, 629(8014), 1109–1117.

Maximum diffusion reinforcement learning. Berrueta, T. A., Pinosky, A., & Murphey, T. D. (2024). Nature Machine Intelligence, 6(5), 504–514.

Neuronal activation sequences in lateral prefrontal cortex encode visuospatial working memory during virtual navigation. Busch, A., Roussy, M., Luna, R., Leavitt, M. L., Mofrad, M. H., Gulli, R. A., … Martinez-Trujillo, J. C. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 4471.

Heterogeneity in strategy use during arbitration between experiential and observational learning. Charpentier, C. J., Wu, Q., Min, S., Ding, W., Cockburn, J., & O’Doherty, J. P. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 4436.

Belief Updating during Social Interactions: Neural Dynamics and Causal Role of Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex. Christian, P., Kaiser, J., Taylor, P. C., George, M., Schütz-Bosbach, S., & Soutschek, A. (2024). Journal of Neuroscience, 44(22), e1669232024.

A fear conditioned cue orchestrates a suite of behaviors in rats. Chu, A., Gordon, N. T., DuBois, A. M., Michel, C. B., Hanrahan, K. E., Williams, D. C., … McDannald, M. A. (2024). eLife, 13, e82497.

Mapping model units to visual neurons reveals population code for social behaviour. Cowley, B. R., Calhoun, A. J., Rangarajan, N., Ireland, E., Turner, M. H., Pillow, J. W., & Murthy, M. (2024). Nature, 629(8014), 1100–1108.

Spatial-Temporal Analysis of Neural Desynchronization in Sleeplike States Reveals Critical Dynamics. Curic, D., Singh, S., Nazari, M., Mohajerani, M. H., & Davidsen, J. (2024). Physical Review Letters, 132(21), 218403.

Simple visual stimuli are sufficient to drive responses in action observation and execution neurons in macaque ventral premotor cortex. De Schrijver, S., Decramer, T., & Janssen, P. (2024). PLOS Biology, 22(5), e3002358.

Intrinsic Neural Excitability Biases Allocation and Overlap of Memory Engrams. Delamare, G., Tomé, D. F., & Clopath, C. (2024). Journal of Neuroscience, 44(21), e0846232024.

Common neural dysfunction of economic decision-making across psychiatric conditions. Feng, C., Liu, Q., Huang, C., Li, T., Wang, L., Liu, F., … Qu, C. (2024). NeuroImage, 294, 120641.

Single trial Bayesian inference by population vector readout in the barn owl’s sound localization system. Fischer, B. J., Shadron, K., Ferger, R., & Peña, J. L. (2024). PLOS ONE, 19(5), e0303843.

Synergizing habits and goals with variational Bayes. Han, D., Doya, K., Li, D., & Tani, J. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 4461.

Dynamic computational phenotyping of human cognition. Schurr, R., Reznik, D., Hillman, H., Bhui, R., & Gershman, S. J. (2024). Nature Human Behaviour, 8(5), 917–931.

Neural Reward Representations Enable Utilitarian Welfare Maximization. Soutschek, A., Burke, C. J., Kang, P., Wieland, N., Netzer, N., & Tobler, P. N. (2024). Journal of Neuroscience, 44(21), e2376232024.

Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate. van Leeuwen, E. J. C., DeTroy, S. E., Haun, D. B. M., & Call, J. (2024). Nature Human Behaviour, 8(5), 891–902.

Paradoxical Boosting of Weak and Strong Spatial Memories by Hippocampal Dopamine Uncaging. Velazquez-Delgado, C., Perez-Becerra, J., Calderon, V., Hernandez-Ortiz, E., Bermudez-Rattoni, F., & Carrillo-Reid, L. (2024). eNeuro, 11(5), ENEURO.0469-23.2024.

Impact of early visual experience on later usage of color cues. Vogelsang, M., Vogelsang, L., Gupta, P., Gandhi, T. K., Shah, P., Swami, P., … Sinha, P. (2024). Science, 384(6698), 907–912.

Learning to Choose: Behavioral Dynamics Underlying the Initial Acquisition of Decision-Making. White, S. R., Preston, M. W., Swanson, K., & Laubach, M. (2024). eNeuro, 11(5), ENEURO.0142-24.2024.

[saldanhastats]

Assignment one: my first hypothesis

I decided to use the NESARC codebook as my source of data. I am interested in assessing the correlation between demographic variables and level of alcohol consumption to hospital visit and admission.

Background

Based on literature search (using the key words "alcohol consumption" "ed visit" and "hospital admission"), there has been evidence in US and Europe of increase in admissions directly or indirectly related to alcohol consumption (2, 4). The percentage of men admitted is higher than women, but women are increasing in numbers. Country and/or personal economic status also plays a role in hospital visit and/or admission (3). Interestingly, blood alcohol level is not necessarily related to length of stay.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that level of alcohol consumption will have a positive relationship with number of ED visits, with a higher correlation with patients that come from lower social economical status or have a concomitant diagnosis of depression and/or anxiety.

Dataset

Demographic data

IDNUM: identification

AGE

SEX

S1Q1C: latin/hispanic

S1Q1D2: asian

S1Q1D3: black or african american

S1Q1D5: white

S1F1D: imputation for race

CENDIV: census region

SPOUSE

S1Q5A: number of children

S1Q6A: highest level of education

S1F6A: imputation for highest educational degree

S1Q7A1: full time work

S1Q11B: household income in last 12 mo

S1F11A: Imputation of household income

S1Q14C1: Medicare coverage

S1F14C1: Imputation for medicare

S1Q14C2: Medicaid coverage

S1F14C2: imputation for medicaid

Cholerzyńska H, Zasada W, Kłosiewicz T, Konieczka P, Mazur M. The Burden of Alcohol-Related Emergency Department Visits in a Hospital of a Large European City. Healthcare (Basel). 2023 Mar 7;11(6):786. doi: 10.3390/healthcare11060786. PMID: 36981443; PMCID: PMC10099728.

Green, M.A., Strong, M., Conway, L. et al. Trends in alcohol-related admissions to hospital by age, sex and socioeconomic deprivation in England, 2002/03 to 2013/14. BMC Public Health 17, 412 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4265-0

Smyth A, Teo KK, Rangarajan S, O'Donnell M, Zhang X, Rana P, Leong DP, Dagenais G, Seron P, Rosengren A, Schutte AE, Lopez-Jaramillo P, Oguz A, Chifamba J, Diaz R, Lear S, Avezum A, Kumar R, Mohan V, Szuba A, Wei L, Yang W, Jian B, McKee M, Yusuf S; PURE Investigators. Alcohol consumption and cardiovascular disease, cancer, injury, admission to hospital, and mortality: a prospective cohort study. Lancet. 2015 Nov 14;386(10007):1945-1954. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00235-4. Epub 2015 Sep 17. PMID: 26386538.

Naeger S. Emergency Department Visits Involving Underage Alcohol Misuse: 2010 to 2013. 2017 May 16. In: The CBHSQ Report. Rockville (MD): Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US); 2013–. PMID: 28632359.

[girlinaswing]

Unposted Letter by T T Rangarajan

Usually when my mother hands me a book with a thinking man on the cover, I take it with a not-so-snide share misgivings. This time was no different except that my mother was smarter.

She first made me listen to a talk given by the author which had me in splits. Then, she handed me the book by saying the same guy wrote it; see, it might be funny; give it a try.

So, putting aside the short story…

[worklabournewsresearch]

Silicon Valley’s Diversity Problem

“Silicon Valley technology firms have had serious problems with demographic diversity, including accusations of hostile climates toward women and minority employees. A new analysis of company-level employment data ... finds that some firms seem to have figured out how to create more diverse workplaces. ... Recent research from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst’s Center for Employment Equity ... analyzed employment data for the 177 largest Silicon Valley technology firms; included in the sampling frame were headline-making firms such as Airbnb, Cisco, Facebook, Google and Uber. [The study] confirmed that there is a diversity problem in Silicon Valley, although [some firms] are doing better than their peers.”

“In most of the top 177 firms ... analyzed, there were few women in technical jobs and even fewer in top executive positions. Black and Hispanic men and women were rare, and were nearly entirely absent from managerial and executive jobs. Asian men and women were common in technical jobs, but rare in leadership positions. ... In contrast, [it was] found that in 7 percent of these 177 largest Silicon Valley technology firms, most of the employees are women. In a handful of companies, black and Hispanic men and women make up more than 5 percent of the professional workforce, and more than 5 percent of management – which is four times their proportion in the local workforce. And though there are firms with no Asian men or women in management, there are also firms in which more than 20 percent of managers are Asian men and women.”

“Employment diversity problems are complex. But their solutions need not be. All of these 177 large technology firms develop innovative products, compete in dynamic global product markets, hire in competitive labor markets and are rapidly transforming societies around the globe. Our research shows that some of these firms are also able to hire diverse groups of employees – and raises the question why others are not.”

The Conversation, June 25, 2018: “Searching for diversity in Silicon Valley tech firms – and finding some,” by Donald T. Tomaskovic-Devey

Center for Employment Equity, June, 2018: “Is Silicon Valley Tech Diversity Possible Now?” (23 pages, PDF)

Reveal, June 25, 2018: “Here’s the clearest picture of Silicon Valley’s diversity yet: It’s bad. But some companies are doing less bad,” by Sinduja Rangarajan

Bloomberg, June 26, 2018: “Netflix Hires Executive to Help Deal With Its Diversity Problem,” by Lucas Shaw

[vsplusonline]

Realty players fear pay cuts, job losses as lockdown hits revenue

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/realty-players-fear-pay-cuts-job-losses-as-lockdown-hits-revenue/

Realty players fear pay cuts, job losses as lockdown hits revenue

New Delhi: Real estate sector, which is estimated to incur a loss of over Rs 1 lakh crore due to nationwide lockdown, is likely to see pay cuts and job losses as cash-strapped builders will look to reduce their fixed cost at a time when their sales revenue has almost come to a grinding halt, according to industry players.

However, property developers and consultants believe that damage could be minimised if the government announces a big relief package for the industry as well as the overall economy.

“Real sector is the second-largest employer after agriculture and provides for both blue and white collar jobs. Construction and other allied workers comprise a very important segment of the Realty Sector. There might be job losses and pay cuts,” CREDAI (National) Chairman Jaxay Shah said.

As of now, he said, the priority is to provide labourers with basic amenities.

“It’s too soon to say anything on pay cuts as this will totally depend on how long the pandemic continues,” Shah said.

NAREDCO President Niranjan Hiranandani said: “There will be an obvious impact on sales, and that in turn will impact profitability of business organizations. So, a pay cut might be the first reaction across business organizations, some jobs being lost might be the second.”

He said revenues of developers, which had already been facing liquidity crunch, would be badly hit, resulting in defaults in repayment of debts.

“If outstanding payments get defaulted on, and the numbers keep rising, companies may go bankrupt, this in turn will directly impact jobs. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, job losses were around 15 per cent of the total workforce, this may increase to 25 per cent,” Hiranandani said.

However, he said if the government soon announces a stimulus package, “Things may not end up being so bad, in terms of companies going bankrupt or jobs being lost.”

Puravankara Ltd MD Ashish Puravankara said, “While the listed players, like us, who are geographically de-risked and have diverse business portfolio, will be able to plan and organise the next steps; the current impasse may pose a problem in the long term for a few companies who might have to take some austerity measures in the shape of job losses or pay cuts.”

Home-grown property consultant Anarock Chairman Anuj Puri said there could be pay cuts and job loss if lockdown continues for a longer period.

“If the lock down was to open in the next 1-2 weeks then we may not see as many job losses or pay cuts,” he said.

Anshuman Magazine, Chairman & CEO – India, South East Asia, Middle East & Africa, CBRE, said: “The Covid-19 situation is still evolving in India and it is too soon to comment on the impact it will have on the industry.”

Ramesh Nair, CEO & Country Head, JLL India, said the company has taken many cost management actions to protect its employees and continue to serve clients.

“JLL has a strong balance sheet and JLL’s businesses in India and beyond are positioned to emerge with resilience from the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. To help ensure our company can continue to protect our people and serve our clients and shareholders now and when the economic and business environment improves, our leaders have agreed to take several prudent cost management actions,” he said.

This discipline would help the company to support its staff and clients across India through this challenging time and be ready for future opportunities, Nair said.

Mani Rangarajan, Group COO, Housing.com, Makaan.com and Proptiger.com, said job losses and pay cuts in the sector will remain limited. He expects real estate to gain renewed interest from both end users as well as investors because of sharp correction in other investment tools like the equity market.

Manoj Gaur, MD, Gaurs Group, said the company has been performing well in terms of sales from the last 3-4 years and disruption of a few months will not have any major impact on financial strength of the company.

Nayan Raheja, Executive Director, Raheja Developers said: “We are waiting and watching on the current situation and how long the lockdown continues to take any definitive call on this matter. However, at the moment all labour and staff are being supported.”

He demanded that the government should restructure existing loans of the builders.

Ashok Gupta, CMD, Ajnara India, said, “These are tough times, but we are standing strongly with our employees amid this crisis.”

NCR-based KW group Director Pankaj Jain said: “As of now we are not deducting salaries of our employees. In the current situation, we all need to support each other. Companies must show more empathy towards their staff.”

Akshay Taneja, MD, TDI Infratech, said, “It is too early to take a call.” MJH MR

if(geolocation && geolocation != 5 && (typeof skip == 'undefined' || typeof skip.fbevents == 'undefined')) !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments); if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '338698809636220'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

Source link

[todaybharatnews]

via Today Bharat DMK president Stalin and Rajya Sabha candidate Tiruchi Siva. Chennai: The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has announced its candidates for the Rajya Sabha elections. Party strongman 'Tiruchi' Siva has been renominated for the March 26 polls. 'Anthiyur' Selvaraj and N R Elango are the other two candidates, DMK president M K Stalin said in a statement. Six Rajya Sabha seats from Tamil Nadu are falling vacant in April following the retirement of several members from the Upper House. nbsp; The MPs who would complete their terms are AIADMKrsquo;s S Muthukaruppan, A K Selvaraj, Vijila Sathyanath and expelled AIADMK MP Sasikala Pushpa, who recently joined the BJP. DMK's 'Tiruchi' Siva and CPM's T K Rangarajan are the other two. The ruling AIADMK is yet to announce its candidates for the polls. According to the Election Commission, the notification would be issued on March 6, the last date for filing of nominations is March 13. Polling is on March 26. The votes would be counted on the same day. ...

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 24, 2018

Auditory Input Shapes Tonotopic Differentiation of Kv1.1 Expression in Avian Cochlear Nucleus during Late Development. Akter, N., Adachi, R., Kato, A., Fukaya, R., & Kuba, H. (2018). Journal of Neuroscience, 38(12), 2967–2980.

Divergence in problem-solving skills is associated with differential expression of glutamate receptors in wild finches. Audet, J.-N., Kayello, L., Ducatez, S., Perillo, S., Cauchard, L., Howard, J. T., … Lefebvre, L. (2018). Science Advances, 4(3), eaao6369.

Single excitatory axons form clustered synapses onto CA1 pyramidal cell dendrites. Bloss, E. B., Cembrowski, M. S., Karsh, B., Colonell, J., Fetter, R. D., & Spruston, N. (2018). Nature Neuroscience, 21(3), 353–363.

Paradoxical accentuation of motivation following accumbens-pallidum disconnection. Chang, S. E., Todd, T. P., & Smith, K. S. (2018). Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 149, 39–45.

Activity-Dependent Downscaling of Subthreshold Synaptic Inputs during Slow-Wave-Sleep-like Activity In Vivo. González-Rueda, A., Pedrosa, V., Feord, R. C., Clopath, C., & Paulsen, O. (2018). Neuron, 97(6), 1244–1252.e5.

Encoding sensory and motor patterns as time-invariant trajectories in recurrent neural networks. Goudar, V., & Buonomano, D. V. (2018). eLife, 7, e31134.

Detecting Unattended Stimuli Depends on the Phase of Prestimulus Neural Oscillations. Harris, A. M., Dux, P. E., & Mattingley, J. B. (2018). Journal of Neuroscience, 38(12), 3092–3101.

Visual Working Memory Is Independent of the Cortical Spacing Between Memoranda. Harrison, W. J., & Bays, P. M. (2018). Journal of Neuroscience, 38(12), 3116–3123.

Information-Theoretic Bounds and Approximations in Neural Population Coding. Huang, W., & Zhang, K. (2018). Neural Computation, 30(4), 885–944.

A Unifying Framework of Synaptic and Intrinsic Plasticity in Neural Populations. Leugering, J., & Pipa, G. (2018). Neural Computation, 30(4), 945–986.

Optimal structure and parameter learning of Ising models. Lokhov, A. Y., Vuffray, M., Misra, S., & Chertkov, M. (2018). Science Advances, 4(3), e1700791.

Rapid Rebalancing of Excitation and Inhibition by Cortical Circuitry. Moore, A. K., Weible, A. P., Balmer, T. S., Trussell, L. O., & Wehr, M. (2018). Neuron, 97(6), 1341–1355.e6.

The human cortex possesses a reconfigurable dynamic network architecture that is disrupted in psychosis. Reinen, J. M., Chén, O. Y., Hutchison, R. M., Yeo, B. T. T., Anderson, K. M., Sabuncu, M. R., … Holmes, A. J. (2018). Nature Communications, 9, 1157.

Spatial Rule Learning and Corresponding CA1 Place Cell Reorientation Depend on Local Dopamine Release. Retailleau, A., & Morris, G. (2018). Current Biology, 28(6), 836–846.e4.

Human hippocampal neurogenesis drops sharply in children to undetectable levels in adults. Sorrells, S. F., Paredes, M. F., Cebrian-Silla, A., Sandoval, K., Qi, D., Kelley, K. W., … Alvarez-Buylla, A. (2018). Nature, 555(7696), 377–381.

Robust Modulation of Integrate-and-Fire Models. Van Pottelbergh, T., Drion, G., & Sepulchre, R. (2018). Neural Computation, 30(4), 987–1011.

Stimuli that signal the availability of reward break into attentional focus. Wang, L., Li, S., Zhou, X., & Theeuwes, J. (2018). Vision Research, 144, 20–28.

Activation of Striatal Neurons Causes a Perceptual Decision Bias during Visual Change Detection in Mice. Wang, L., Rangarajan, K. V., Gerfen, C. R., & Krauzlis, R. J. (2018). Neuron, 97(6), 1369–1381.e5.

Voltage dependence of synaptic plasticity is essential for rate based learning with short stimuli. Weissenberger, F., Gauy, M. M., Lengler, J., Meier, F., & Steger, A. (2018). Scientific Reports, 8, 4609.

Entorhinal cortex receptive fields are modulated by spatial attention, even without movement. Wilming, N., König, P., König, S., & Buffalo, E. A. (2018). eLife, 7, e31745.

[jesseneufeld]

Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It

The scientific literature is awash in correlations between a person’s health status and various biomarkers, personal characteristics, and measurements. As we hoard more and more data and develop increasingly sophisticated autonomous tools to analyze it, we’ll stumble across new connections between seemingly disparate variables. Some will be spurious, where the correlations are real but the variables don’t affect each other. Others will be useful, where the correlations indicate real causality, or at least a real relationship.

One of my favorite health markers—one that is both modifiable and a good barometer for the conditions it appears to predict—is grip strength.

The Benefits of Grip Strength

In middle-aged and elderly people, grip strength consistently predicts mortality risk from all causes, doing an even better job than blood pressure. In older disabled women, grip strength predicts all-cause mortality, even when controlling for disease status, inflammatory load, depression, nutritional status, and inactivity.

Poor grip strength is also an independent risk factor for type 2 diabetes across all ethnicities, and it can predict the presence of osteoarthritis in the knee. Among Korean adults, those with lower grip strength have a greater risk of clinical depression.

Even when hand grip strength fails to predict a disease, it still predicts the quality of life in people with the disease. The relative rate of grip strength reduction in healthy people is a good marker for the progression of general aging. Faster decline, faster aging. Slower (or no) decline, slower aging. Stronger people—as indicated by their grip strength—are simply better at navigating the physical world and maintaining independence on into old age.

Health and longevity aside, there are other real benefits to a stronger grip.

You command more respect. I don’t care how bad it sounds, because I agree. Historically, a person’s personal worth and legitimacy was judged by the quality of their handshake. Right or wrong, that’s how we’re wired. If you think you feel differently, let me know how you feel the next time you shake hands and the other person has a limp, moist hand. Who are you more likely to respect? To hire? To deem more capable? To befriend? To approach romantically? I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it’s simply how it is. We can’t avoid our guttural reaction to a strong—or weak—handshake. To me, that suggests we have a built-in sensitivity to grip for a very good reason.

So, how does one build grip?

10 Exercises To Build Grip Strength

Most people will get a strong-enough grip as long as they’re lifting heavy things on a consistent-enough basis.

1. Deadlifts

Deadlifts are proven grip builders. Wide grip deadlifts are also good and stress your grip across slightly different angles.

2. Pullups and 3. Chinups

Both require a good grip on the bar.

Any exercise where your grip supports either your weight or an external weight (like a barbell, dumbbell, or kettlebell) is going to improve your grip strength. But there are other, more targeted movements you can try to really turn your hand into a vise. Such as:

4. Bar Hangs

This is pretty simple. Just hang from a bar (or branch, or traffic light fixture) with both hands. It’s probably the purest expression of grip strength. As it happens, it’s also a great stretch for your lats, chest, shoulders, and thoracic spine.

Aim to hit one minute. Progress to one-hand hangs if two-handers get too easy. You can use a lower bar and keep one foot on the ground for support as you transition toward a full one-handed hang.

5. Sledgehammer Work

Grab the heaviest sledgehammer you can handle and use it in a variety of ways.

If you had to pick just one sledgehammer movement to target your grip, do the bottoms up. Hold the hammer hanging down pointing toward the ground in your hand, swing it up and catch it with the head of the hammer pointing upward, and hold it there. Handle parallel to your torso, wrist straight, don’t let it fall. The lower you grip the handle, the harder your forearms (and grip) will have to work.

6. Fingertip Pushups

Most people who try fingertip pushups do them one way. They do them with straight fingers, with the palm dipping toward the ground. Like this. Those are great, but there’s another technique as well: the claw.  For the claw, make a claw with your hand, like this, as if you’re trying to grab the ground. In fact, do try to grab the ground. This keeps your fingers more active, builds more strength and resilience, and prevents you from resting on your connective tissue.

These are hard for most people. They’re quite hard on the connective tissue, which often goes underutilized in the hands and forearms. Don’t just leap into full fingertip pushups—unless you know you’re able. Start on your knees, gradually pushing your knees further back to add resistance. Once they’re all the way back and you’re comfortable, then progress to full pushups.

7. Active Hands Pushups

These are similar to claw pushups, only with the palm down on the floor. Flat palm, active “claw” fingers. They are easier than fingertip pushups.

8. Farmer’s Walks

The average person these days is not carrying water pails and hay bales and feed bags back and forth across uneven ground like they did when over 30% of the population lived on farms, but the average person can quickly graduate past average by doing farmer’s walks a couple times each week. What is a farmer’s walk?

Grab two heavy weights, stand up, and walk around. They can be dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, or trap bars. You can walk up hill, down hill, or around in circles. You can throw in some shrugs, or bookend your walks with deadlifts or swings. The point is to use your grip to carry something heavy in both hands.

9. Pinch Grips

Grasp and hold weight plates between your thumb and each finger.

10. Hammer Curls

Next time you do some curls, throw in a few sets of hammer curls. These are identical to normal bicep curls, except you hold the weights in a hammer grip, with palms facing toward each other—like how you hold and swing a hammer. Make sure to keep those wrists as straight as possible.

The thing about grip is it’s hard to work your grip without getting stronger, healthier, and faster all over. Deadlifting builds grip strength, and it also builds back, hip, glute, and torso strength. Fingertip pushups make your hands and forearms strong, but they also work your chest, triceps, abs, and shoulders. That’s why I suspect grip strength is such a good barometer for overall health, wellness, and longevity. Almost every meaningful piece of physical activity requires that you use your hands to manipulate significant amounts of weight and undergo significant amounts of stress.

For that reason, the best way to train your grip is with normal movements. Heavy deadlifts and farmer’s walks are probably more effective than spending half an hour pinch gripping with every possible thumb/finger permutation, because they offer more full-body benefits. But if you have a few extra minutes throughout your workout, throw in some of the dedicated grip training.

Your grip can handle it. The grip muscles in the hands and forearm are mostly slow-twitch fiber dominant, meaning they’re designed to go for long periods of exertion. They’re also gross movers, meaning you use them all the time for all sorts of tasks, and have been doing so for decades. To make them adapt, you need to stress the heck out of them with high weight. Train grip with high reps, heavy weights, and long durations. This is why deadlifts and farmer’s walks are so good for your grip—they force you to maintain that grip on a heavy bar or dumbbell for the entire duration of the set with little to no rest.

Oh, and pick up some Fat Gripz. These attach to dumbbells and barbells and increase the diameter of the bar, giving you less leverage when grabbing and forcing you to adapt to the new grip conditions by getting stronger.

Now, will all this grip training actually protect you from aging, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and early all-cause mortality? Maybe, maybe not.

But it—and the muscle and fitness you gain doing all these exercises—certainly doesn’t hurt.

How’s your grip? How’s your handshake? How long can you hang from a bar without letting go?

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care, be well, and go pick up and hold some heavy stuff.

(function($) { $("#dfwDCHe").load("https://www.marksdailyapple.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=dfads_ajax_load_ads&groups=960&limit=1&orderby=random&order=ASC&container_id=&container_html=none&container_class=&ad_html=div&ad_class=&callback_function=&return_javascript=0&_block_id=dfwDCHe" ); })( jQuery );

ga('send', { hitType: 'event', eventCategory: 'Ad Impression', eventAction: '67622' });

References:

Sasaki H, Kasagi F, Yamada M, Fujita S. Grip strength predicts cause-specific mortality in middle-aged and elderly persons. Am J Med. 2007;120(4):337-42.

Leong DP, Teo KK, Rangarajan S, et al. Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. Lancet. 2015;386(9990):266-73.

Rantanen T, Volpato S, Ferrucci L, Heikkinen E, Fried LP, Guralnik JM. Handgrip strength and cause-specific and total mortality in older disabled women: exploring the mechanism. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2003;51(5):636-41.

Van der kooi AL, Snijder MB, Peters RJ, Van valkengoed IG. The Association of Handgrip Strength and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Six Ethnic Groups: An Analysis of the HELIUS Study. PLoS ONE. 2015;10(9):e0137739.

Wen L, Shin MH, Kang JH, et al. Association between grip strength and hand and knee radiographic osteoarthritis in Korean adults: Data from the Dong-gu study. PLoS ONE. 2017;12(11):e0185343.

Lee MR, Jung SM, Bang H, Kim HS, Kim YB. The association between muscular strength and depression in Korean adults: a cross-sectional analysis of the sixth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES VI) 2014. BMC Public Health. 2018;18(1):1123.

Lee SH, Kim SJ, Han Y, Ryu YJ, Lee JH, Chang JH. Hand grip strength and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Korea: an analysis in KNHANES VI. Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2017;12:2313-2321.

Iconaru EI, Ciucurel MM, Georgescu L, Ciucurel C. Hand grip strength as a physical biomarker of aging from the perspective of a Fibonacci mathematical modeling. BMC Geriatr. 2018;18(1):296.

The post Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It published first on https://drugaddictionsrehab.tumblr.com/

[watsonrodriquezie]

Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It

The scientific literature is awash in correlations between a person’s health status and various biomarkers, personal characteristics, and measurements. As we hoard more and more data and develop increasingly sophisticated autonomous tools to analyze it, we’ll stumble across new connections between seemingly disparate variables. Some will be spurious, where the correlations are real but the variables don’t affect each other. Others will be useful, where the correlations indicate real causality, or at least a real relationship.

One of my favorite health markers—one that is both modifiable and a good barometer for the conditions it appears to predict—is grip strength.

The Benefits of Grip Strength

In middle-aged and elderly people, grip strength consistently predicts mortality risk from all causes, doing an even better job than blood pressure. In older disabled women, grip strength predicts all-cause mortality, even when controlling for disease status, inflammatory load, depression, nutritional status, and inactivity.

Poor grip strength is also an independent risk factor for type 2 diabetes across all ethnicities, and it can predict the presence of osteoarthritis in the knee. Among Korean adults, those with lower grip strength have a greater risk of clinical depression.

Even when hand grip strength fails to predict a disease, it still predicts the quality of life in people with the disease. The relative rate of grip strength reduction in healthy people is a good marker for the progression of general aging. Faster decline, faster aging. Slower (or no) decline, slower aging. Stronger people—as indicated by their grip strength—are simply better at navigating the physical world and maintaining independence on into old age.

Health and longevity aside, there are other real benefits to a stronger grip.

You command more respect. I don’t care how bad it sounds, because I agree. Historically, a person’s personal worth and legitimacy was judged by the quality of their handshake. Right or wrong, that’s how we’re wired. If you think you feel differently, let me know how you feel the next time you shake hands and the other person has a limp, moist hand. Who are you more likely to respect? To hire? To deem more capable? To befriend? To approach romantically? I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it’s simply how it is. We can’t avoid our guttural reaction to a strong—or weak—handshake. To me, that suggests we have a built-in sensitivity to grip for a very good reason.

So, how does one build grip?

10 Exercises To Build Grip Strength

Most people will get a strong-enough grip as long as they’re lifting heavy things on a consistent-enough basis.

1. Deadlifts

Deadlifts are proven grip builders. Wide grip deadlifts are also good and stress your grip across slightly different angles.

2. Pullups and 3. Chinups

Both require a good grip on the bar.

Any exercise where your grip supports either your weight or an external weight (like a barbell, dumbbell, or kettlebell) is going to improve your grip strength. But there are other, more targeted movements you can try to really turn your hand into a vise. Such as:

4. Bar Hangs

This is pretty simple. Just hang from a bar (or branch, or traffic light fixture) with both hands. It’s probably the purest expression of grip strength. As it happens, it’s also a great stretch for your lats, chest, shoulders, and thoracic spine.

Aim to hit one minute. Progress to one-hand hangs if two-handers get too easy. You can use a lower bar and keep one foot on the ground for support as you transition toward a full one-handed hang.

5. Sledgehammer Work

Grab the heaviest sledgehammer you can handle and use it in a variety of ways.

If you had to pick just one sledgehammer movement to target your grip, do the bottoms up. Hold the hammer hanging down pointing toward the ground in your hand, swing it up and catch it with the head of the hammer pointing upward, and hold it there. Handle parallel to your torso, wrist straight, don’t let it fall. The lower you grip the handle, the harder your forearms (and grip) will have to work.

6. Fingertip Pushups

Most people who try fingertip pushups do them one way. They do them with straight fingers, with the palm dipping toward the ground. Like this. Those are great, but there’s another technique as well: the claw.  For the claw, make a claw with your hand, like this, as if you’re trying to grab the ground. In fact, do try to grab the ground. This keeps your fingers more active, builds more strength and resilience, and prevents you from resting on your connective tissue.

These are hard for most people. They’re quite hard on the connective tissue, which often goes underutilized in the hands and forearms. Don’t just leap into full fingertip pushups—unless you know you’re able. Start on your knees, gradually pushing your knees further back to add resistance. Once they’re all the way back and you’re comfortable, then progress to full pushups.

7. Active Hands Pushups

These are similar to claw pushups, only with the palm down on the floor. Flat palm, active “claw” fingers. They are easier than fingertip pushups.

8. Farmer’s Walks

The average person these days is not carrying water pails and hay bales and feed bags back and forth across uneven ground like they did when over 30% of the population lived on farms, but the average person can quickly graduate past average by doing farmer’s walks a couple times each week. What is a farmer’s walk?

Grab two heavy weights, stand up, and walk around. They can be dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, or trap bars. You can walk up hill, down hill, or around in circles. You can throw in some shrugs, or bookend your walks with deadlifts or swings. The point is to use your grip to carry something heavy in both hands.

9. Pinch Grips

Grasp and hold weight plates between your thumb and each finger.

10. Hammer Curls

Next time you do some curls, throw in a few sets of hammer curls. These are identical to normal bicep curls, except you hold the weights in a hammer grip, with palms facing toward each other—like how you hold and swing a hammer. Make sure to keep those wrists as straight as possible.

The thing about grip is it’s hard to work your grip without getting stronger, healthier, and faster all over. Deadlifting builds grip strength, and it also builds back, hip, glute, and torso strength. Fingertip pushups make your hands and forearms strong, but they also work your chest, triceps, abs, and shoulders. That’s why I suspect grip strength is such a good barometer for overall health, wellness, and longevity. Almost every meaningful piece of physical activity requires that you use your hands to manipulate significant amounts of weight and undergo significant amounts of stress.

For that reason, the best way to train your grip is with normal movements. Heavy deadlifts and farmer’s walks are probably more effective than spending half an hour pinch gripping with every possible thumb/finger permutation, because they offer more full-body benefits. But if you have a few extra minutes throughout your workout, throw in some of the dedicated grip training.

Your grip can handle it. The grip muscles in the hands and forearm are mostly slow-twitch fiber dominant, meaning they’re designed to go for long periods of exertion. They’re also gross movers, meaning you use them all the time for all sorts of tasks, and have been doing so for decades. To make them adapt, you need to stress the heck out of them with high weight. Train grip with high reps, heavy weights, and long durations. This is why deadlifts and farmer’s walks are so good for your grip—they force you to maintain that grip on a heavy bar or dumbbell for the entire duration of the set with little to no rest.

Oh, and pick up some Fat Gripz. These attach to dumbbells and barbells and increase the diameter of the bar, giving you less leverage when grabbing and forcing you to adapt to the new grip conditions by getting stronger.

Now, will all this grip training actually protect you from aging, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and early all-cause mortality? Maybe, maybe not.

But it—and the muscle and fitness you gain doing all these exercises—certainly doesn’t hurt.

How’s your grip? How’s your handshake? How long can you hang from a bar without letting go?

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care, be well, and go pick up and hold some heavy stuff.

References:

Sasaki H, Kasagi F, Yamada M, Fujita S. Grip strength predicts cause-specific mortality in middle-aged and elderly persons. Am J Med. 2007;120(4):337-42.

Leong DP, Teo KK, Rangarajan S, et al. Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. Lancet. 2015;386(9990):266-73.

Rantanen T, Volpato S, Ferrucci L, Heikkinen E, Fried LP, Guralnik JM. Handgrip strength and cause-specific and total mortality in older disabled women: exploring the mechanism. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2003;51(5):636-41.

Van der kooi AL, Snijder MB, Peters RJ, Van valkengoed IG. The Association of Handgrip Strength and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Six Ethnic Groups: An Analysis of the HELIUS Study. PLoS ONE. 2015;10(9):e0137739.

Wen L, Shin MH, Kang JH, et al. Association between grip strength and hand and knee radiographic osteoarthritis in Korean adults: Data from the Dong-gu study. PLoS ONE. 2017;12(11):e0185343.

Lee MR, Jung SM, Bang H, Kim HS, Kim YB. The association between muscular strength and depression in Korean adults: a cross-sectional analysis of the sixth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES VI) 2014. BMC Public Health. 2018;18(1):1123.

Lee SH, Kim SJ, Han Y, Ryu YJ, Lee JH, Chang JH. Hand grip strength and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Korea: an analysis in KNHANES VI. Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2017;12:2313-2321.

Iconaru EI, Ciucurel MM, Georgescu L, Ciucurel C. Hand grip strength as a physical biomarker of aging from the perspective of a Fibonacci mathematical modeling. BMC Geriatr. 2018;18(1):296.

The post Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

[milenasanchezmk]

Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It

The scientific literature is awash in correlations between a person’s health status and various biomarkers, personal characteristics, and measurements. As we hoard more and more data and develop increasingly sophisticated autonomous tools to analyze it, we’ll stumble across new connections between seemingly disparate variables. Some will be spurious, where the correlations are real but the variables don’t affect each other. Others will be useful, where the correlations indicate real causality, or at least a real relationship.

One of my favorite health markers—one that is both modifiable and a good barometer for the conditions it appears to predict—is grip strength.

The Benefits of Grip Strength

In middle-aged and elderly people, grip strength consistently predicts mortality risk from all causes, doing an even better job than blood pressure. In older disabled women, grip strength predicts all-cause mortality, even when controlling for disease status, inflammatory load, depression, nutritional status, and inactivity.

Poor grip strength is also an independent risk factor for type 2 diabetes across all ethnicities, and it can predict the presence of osteoarthritis in the knee. Among Korean adults, those with lower grip strength have a greater risk of clinical depression.

Even when hand grip strength fails to predict a disease, it still predicts the quality of life in people with the disease. The relative rate of grip strength reduction in healthy people is a good marker for the progression of general aging. Faster decline, faster aging. Slower (or no) decline, slower aging. Stronger people—as indicated by their grip strength—are simply better at navigating the physical world and maintaining independence on into old age.

Health and longevity aside, there are other real benefits to a stronger grip.

You command more respect. I don’t care how bad it sounds, because I agree. Historically, a person’s personal worth and legitimacy was judged by the quality of their handshake. Right or wrong, that’s how we’re wired. If you think you feel differently, let me know how you feel the next time you shake hands and the other person has a limp, moist hand. Who are you more likely to respect? To hire? To deem more capable? To befriend? To approach romantically? I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it’s simply how it is. We can’t avoid our guttural reaction to a strong—or weak—handshake. To me, that suggests we have a built-in sensitivity to grip for a very good reason.

So, how does one build grip?

10 Exercises To Build Grip Strength

Most people will get a strong-enough grip as long as they’re lifting heavy things on a consistent-enough basis.

1. Deadlifts

Deadlifts are proven grip builders. Wide grip deadlifts are also good and stress your grip across slightly different angles.

2. Pullups and 3. Chinups

Both require a good grip on the bar.

Any exercise where your grip supports either your weight or an external weight (like a barbell, dumbbell, or kettlebell) is going to improve your grip strength. But there are other, more targeted movements you can try to really turn your hand into a vise. Such as:

4. Bar Hangs

This is pretty simple. Just hang from a bar (or branch, or traffic light fixture) with both hands. It’s probably the purest expression of grip strength. As it happens, it’s also a great stretch for your lats, chest, shoulders, and thoracic spine.

Aim to hit one minute. Progress to one-hand hangs if two-handers get too easy. You can use a lower bar and keep one foot on the ground for support as you transition toward a full one-handed hang.

5. Sledgehammer Work

Grab the heaviest sledgehammer you can handle and use it in a variety of ways.

If you had to pick just one sledgehammer movement to target your grip, do the bottoms up. Hold the hammer hanging down pointing toward the ground in your hand, swing it up and catch it with the head of the hammer pointing upward, and hold it there. Handle parallel to your torso, wrist straight, don’t let it fall. The lower you grip the handle, the harder your forearms (and grip) will have to work.

6. Fingertip Pushups

Most people who try fingertip pushups do them one way. They do them with straight fingers, with the palm dipping toward the ground. Like this. Those are great, but there’s another technique as well: the claw.  For the claw, make a claw with your hand, like this, as if you’re trying to grab the ground. In fact, do try to grab the ground. This keeps your fingers more active, builds more strength and resilience, and prevents you from resting on your connective tissue.

These are hard for most people. They’re quite hard on the connective tissue, which often goes underutilized in the hands and forearms. Don’t just leap into full fingertip pushups—unless you know you’re able. Start on your knees, gradually pushing your knees further back to add resistance. Once they’re all the way back and you’re comfortable, then progress to full pushups.

7. Active Hands Pushups

These are similar to claw pushups, only with the palm down on the floor. Flat palm, active “claw” fingers. They are easier than fingertip pushups.

8. Farmer’s Walks

The average person these days is not carrying water pails and hay bales and feed bags back and forth across uneven ground like they did when over 30% of the population lived on farms, but the average person can quickly graduate past average by doing farmer’s walks a couple times each week. What is a farmer’s walk?

Grab two heavy weights, stand up, and walk around. They can be dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, or trap bars. You can walk up hill, down hill, or around in circles. You can throw in some shrugs, or bookend your walks with deadlifts or swings. The point is to use your grip to carry something heavy in both hands.

9. Pinch Grips

Grasp and hold weight plates between your thumb and each finger.

10. Hammer Curls

Next time you do some curls, throw in a few sets of hammer curls. These are identical to normal bicep curls, except you hold the weights in a hammer grip, with palms facing toward each other—like how you hold and swing a hammer. Make sure to keep those wrists as straight as possible.

The thing about grip is it’s hard to work your grip without getting stronger, healthier, and faster all over. Deadlifting builds grip strength, and it also builds back, hip, glute, and torso strength. Fingertip pushups make your hands and forearms strong, but they also work your chest, triceps, abs, and shoulders. That’s why I suspect grip strength is such a good barometer for overall health, wellness, and longevity. Almost every meaningful piece of physical activity requires that you use your hands to manipulate significant amounts of weight and undergo significant amounts of stress.

For that reason, the best way to train your grip is with normal movements. Heavy deadlifts and farmer’s walks are probably more effective than spending half an hour pinch gripping with every possible thumb/finger permutation, because they offer more full-body benefits. But if you have a few extra minutes throughout your workout, throw in some of the dedicated grip training.

Your grip can handle it. The grip muscles in the hands and forearm are mostly slow-twitch fiber dominant, meaning they’re designed to go for long periods of exertion. They’re also gross movers, meaning you use them all the time for all sorts of tasks, and have been doing so for decades. To make them adapt, you need to stress the heck out of them with high weight. Train grip with high reps, heavy weights, and long durations. This is why deadlifts and farmer’s walks are so good for your grip—they force you to maintain that grip on a heavy bar or dumbbell for the entire duration of the set with little to no rest.

Oh, and pick up some Fat Gripz. These attach to dumbbells and barbells and increase the diameter of the bar, giving you less leverage when grabbing and forcing you to adapt to the new grip conditions by getting stronger.

Now, will all this grip training actually protect you from aging, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and early all-cause mortality? Maybe, maybe not.

But it—and the muscle and fitness you gain doing all these exercises—certainly doesn’t hurt.

How’s your grip? How’s your handshake? How long can you hang from a bar without letting go?

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care, be well, and go pick up and hold some heavy stuff.

References:

Sasaki H, Kasagi F, Yamada M, Fujita S. Grip strength predicts cause-specific mortality in middle-aged and elderly persons. Am J Med. 2007;120(4):337-42.

Leong DP, Teo KK, Rangarajan S, et al. Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. Lancet. 2015;386(9990):266-73.

Rantanen T, Volpato S, Ferrucci L, Heikkinen E, Fried LP, Guralnik JM. Handgrip strength and cause-specific and total mortality in older disabled women: exploring the mechanism. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2003;51(5):636-41.

Van der kooi AL, Snijder MB, Peters RJ, Van valkengoed IG. The Association of Handgrip Strength and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Six Ethnic Groups: An Analysis of the HELIUS Study. PLoS ONE. 2015;10(9):e0137739.

Wen L, Shin MH, Kang JH, et al. Association between grip strength and hand and knee radiographic osteoarthritis in Korean adults: Data from the Dong-gu study. PLoS ONE. 2017;12(11):e0185343.

Lee MR, Jung SM, Bang H, Kim HS, Kim YB. The association between muscular strength and depression in Korean adults: a cross-sectional analysis of the sixth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES VI) 2014. BMC Public Health. 2018;18(1):1123.

Lee SH, Kim SJ, Han Y, Ryu YJ, Lee JH, Chang JH. Hand grip strength and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Korea: an analysis in KNHANES VI. Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2017;12:2313-2321.

Iconaru EI, Ciucurel MM, Georgescu L, Ciucurel C. Hand grip strength as a physical biomarker of aging from the perspective of a Fibonacci mathematical modeling. BMC Geriatr. 2018;18(1):296.

The post Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

[tumimmtxpapers]

BET proteins in abnormal metabolism, inflammation, and the breast cancer microenvironment.

BET proteins in abnormal metabolism, inflammation, and the breast cancer microenvironment. J Leukoc Biol. 2018 Mar 01;: Authors: Andrieu GP, Shafran JS, Deeney JT, Bharadwaj KR, Rangarajan A, Denis GV Abstract Obesity and its associated pathology Type 2 diabetes are two chronic metabolic and inflammatory diseases that promote breast cancer progression, metastasis, and poor outcomes. Emerging critical opinion considers unresolved inflammation and abnormal metabolism separately from obesity; settings where they do not co-occur can inform disease mechanism. In breast cancer, the tumor microenvironment is often infiltrated with T effector and T regulatory cells programmed by metabolic signaling. The pathways by which tumor cells evade immune surveillance, immune therapies, and take advantage of antitumor immunity are poorly understood, but likely depend on metabolic inflammation in the microenvironment. Immune functions are abnormal in metabolic disease, and lessons learned from preclinical studies in lean and metabolically normal environments may not translate to patients with obesity and metabolic disease. This problem is made more urgent by the rising incidence of breast cancer among women who are not obese but who have metabolic disease and associated inflammation, a phenotype common in Asia. The somatic BET proteins, comprising BRD2, BRD3, and BRD4, are new critical regulators of metabolism, coactivate transcription of genes that encode proinflammatory cytokines in immune cell subsets infiltrating the microenvironment, and could be important targets in breast cancer immunotherapy. These transcriptional coregulators are well known to regulate tumor cell progression, but only recently identified as critical for metabolism, metastasis, and expression of immune checkpoint molecules. We consider interrelationships among metabolism, inflammation, and breast cancer aggressiveness relevant to the emerging threat of breast cancer among women with metabolic disease, but without obesity. PMID: 29493812 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] http://dlvr.it/QJRDh8

[vsplusonline]

Madhya Pradesh crisis: Most parties say Parliament closure will send wrong message

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/madhya-pradesh-crisis-most-parties-say-parliament-closure-will-send-wrong-message/

Madhya Pradesh crisis: Most parties say Parliament closure will send wrong message

NEW DELHI: While cities are heading towards a lockdown amid the Covid-19 outbreak, Parliament continues to function and is looking to do so until April 2.

Even as members of Parliament across party lines privately expressed concern at the Centre’s decision to keep House working and even hinted at political motives, most agreed a closure would not send the right signal to the public.

While both the Congress and the BJP are taking a stand keeping in mind the volatile political situation in Madhya Pradesh; many other parties too find merit in the idea of sending the right public message.

“While our party has not taken a studied and official position, the issue was brought up in the House in the last two days. The government has assured that utmost safety is being ensured for the functioning of the House and all possible measures are being taken. We are so far, going by that assessment”, TK Rangarajan, CPM MP from Rajya Sabha told ET.

CPI’s D Raja said that while the Prime Minister is yet to take Parliament into confidence on the issue, there is the need to ensure no panic is spread.

“We do think it may send a very wrong message to the people if Parliament closes down at this point. It may create even more panic,” Raja told ET.

BJD MP in Lok Sabha Pinaki Misra said that there were equally strong arguments on either side of the issue but larger public good has to be kept high on agenda.

“The government is of the view that parliamentarians must not stop working or else the message will go out that the country is shutting down. Also, many may feel that MPs are trying to protect only themselves from a riskthat is definitely not the right signal to send to people. That is a strong point. At the same time, there are concerns on community risks on safety of everyone operating and on duty in Parliament. As a party, we haven’t taken a specific position on it”, Misra said.

A BSP MP, on the condition of anonymity, conceded that adequate safety arrangements may not be in place in Parliament where so many persons are deployed. He, however, said that his party is yet to take any public position on the matter.

Trinamool Congress MP Kakoli Ghose Dastidar- a trained doctor herself- said she did not think it advisable to keep Parliament functioning in such a situation.

“The issue was raised in the Rajya Sabha on so many people gathering at one place and the dangers involved. The West Bengal assembly has closed down for now. It is definitely not advisable to keep things running where large gatherings are involved,” Ghosh said.

The TMC MP has now gone into a self-quarantine after a random thermal check showed she may be running high temperature.

Aam Aadmi Party is one of the few which has strongly advocated closure of Parliament. AAP MP Sanjay Singh had written to the Lok Sabha Speaker and Rajya Sabha Chairman on the matter.

Meanwhile, it is business as usual in Parliament with consultative committee meetings, meetings of standing committees continuing. As many as five Bills have been lined up as government business for the Lok Sabha in the coming days.

The only concession being made so far is for the coming Monday and the one after.

ET gathers that the Business Advisory Committee of Lok Sabha decided at a meeting on Thursday that the Lok Sabha will function from 2 pm on Monday instead of the usual 11am keeping in mind heavy flight rescheduling that has been effected.

This would affect travel schedules of MPs returning from their constituencies after the weekend. Sources said that Rajya Sabha is likely to follow suit.

if(geolocation && geolocation != 5 && (typeof skip == 'undefined' || typeof skip.fbevents == 'undefined')) !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments); if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '338698809636220'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

Source link

[naivelocus]

Chromatin-enriched lncRNAs can act as cell-type specific activators of proximal gene transcription

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. doi:10.1038/nsmb.3424

Authors: Michael S Werner, Matthew A Sullivan, Rohan N Shah, Rangarajan D Nadadur, Adrian T Grzybowski, Vasiliy Galat, Ivan P Moskowitz & Alexander J Ruthenburg

— Nature Structural & Molecular Biology

[jesseneufeld]

Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It

The scientific literature is awash in correlations between a person’s health status and various biomarkers, personal characteristics, and measurements. As we hoard more and more data and develop increasingly sophisticated autonomous tools to analyze it, we’ll stumble across new connections between seemingly disparate variables. Some will be spurious, where the correlations are real but the variables don’t affect each other. Others will be useful, where the correlations indicate real causality, or at least a real relationship.

One of my favorite health markers—one that is both modifiable and a good barometer for the conditions it appears to predict—is grip strength.

The Benefits of Grip Strength

In middle-aged and elderly people, grip strength consistently predicts mortality risk from all causes, doing an even better job than blood pressure. In older disabled women, grip strength predicts all-cause mortality, even when controlling for disease status, inflammatory load, depression, nutritional status, and inactivity.

Poor grip strength is also an independent risk factor for type 2 diabetes across all ethnicities, and it can predict the presence of osteoarthritis in the knee. Among Korean adults, those with lower grip strength have a greater risk of clinical depression.

Even when hand grip strength fails to predict a disease, it still predicts the quality of life in people with the disease. The relative rate of grip strength reduction in healthy people is a good marker for the progression of general aging. Faster decline, faster aging. Slower (or no) decline, slower aging. Stronger people—as indicated by their grip strength—are simply better at navigating the physical world and maintaining independence on into old age.

Health and longevity aside, there are other real benefits to a stronger grip.

You command more respect. I don’t care how bad it sounds, because I agree. Historically, a person’s personal worth and legitimacy was judged by the quality of their handshake. Right or wrong, that’s how we’re wired. If you think you feel differently, let me know how you feel the next time you shake hands and the other person has a limp, moist hand. Who are you more likely to respect? To hire? To deem more capable? To befriend? To approach romantically? I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it’s simply how it is. We can’t avoid our guttural reaction to a strong—or weak—handshake. To me, that suggests we have a built-in sensitivity to grip for a very good reason.

So, how does one build grip?

10 Exercises To Build Grip Strength

Most people will get a strong-enough grip as long as they’re lifting heavy things on a consistent-enough basis.

1. Deadlifts

Deadlifts are proven grip builders. Wide grip deadlifts are also good and stress your grip across slightly different angles.

2. Pullups and 3. Chinups

Both require a good grip on the bar.

Any exercise where your grip supports either your weight or an external weight (like a barbell, dumbbell, or kettlebell) is going to improve your grip strength. But there are other, more targeted movements you can try to really turn your hand into a vise. Such as:

4. Bar Hangs

This is pretty simple. Just hang from a bar (or branch, or traffic light fixture) with both hands. It’s probably the purest expression of grip strength. As it happens, it’s also a great stretch for your lats, chest, shoulders, and thoracic spine.

Aim to hit one minute. Progress to one-hand hangs if two-handers get too easy. You can use a lower bar and keep one foot on the ground for support as you transition toward a full one-handed hang.

5. Sledgehammer Work

Grab the heaviest sledgehammer you can handle and use it in a variety of ways.

If you had to pick just one sledgehammer movement to target your grip, do the bottoms up. Hold the hammer hanging down pointing toward the ground in your hand, swing it up and catch it with the head of the hammer pointing upward, and hold it there. Handle parallel to your torso, wrist straight, don’t let it fall. The lower you grip the handle, the harder your forearms (and grip) will have to work.

6. Fingertip Pushups

Most people who try fingertip pushups do them one way. They do them with straight fingers, with the palm dipping toward the ground. Like this. Those are great, but there’s another technique as well: the claw.  For the claw, make a claw with your hand, like this, as if you’re trying to grab the ground. In fact, do try to grab the ground. This keeps your fingers more active, builds more strength and resilience, and prevents you from resting on your connective tissue.

These are hard for most people. They’re quite hard on the connective tissue, which often goes underutilized in the hands and forearms. Don’t just leap into full fingertip pushups—unless you know you’re able. Start on your knees, gradually pushing your knees further back to add resistance. Once they’re all the way back and you’re comfortable, then progress to full pushups.

7. Active Hands Pushups

These are similar to claw pushups, only with the palm down on the floor. Flat palm, active “claw” fingers. They are easier than fingertip pushups.

8. Farmer’s Walks

The average person these days is not carrying water pails and hay bales and feed bags back and forth across uneven ground like they did when over 30% of the population lived on farms, but the average person can quickly graduate past average by doing farmer’s walks a couple times each week. What is a farmer’s walk?

Grab two heavy weights, stand up, and walk around. They can be dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, or trap bars. You can walk up hill, down hill, or around in circles. You can throw in some shrugs, or bookend your walks with deadlifts or swings. The point is to use your grip to carry something heavy in both hands.

9. Pinch Grips

Grasp and hold weight plates between your thumb and each finger.

10. Hammer Curls

Next time you do some curls, throw in a few sets of hammer curls. These are identical to normal bicep curls, except you hold the weights in a hammer grip, with palms facing toward each other—like how you hold and swing a hammer. Make sure to keep those wrists as straight as possible.

The thing about grip is it’s hard to work your grip without getting stronger, healthier, and faster all over. Deadlifting builds grip strength, and it also builds back, hip, glute, and torso strength. Fingertip pushups make your hands and forearms strong, but they also work your chest, triceps, abs, and shoulders. That’s why I suspect grip strength is such a good barometer for overall health, wellness, and longevity. Almost every meaningful piece of physical activity requires that you use your hands to manipulate significant amounts of weight and undergo significant amounts of stress.

For that reason, the best way to train your grip is with normal movements. Heavy deadlifts and farmer’s walks are probably more effective than spending half an hour pinch gripping with every possible thumb/finger permutation, because they offer more full-body benefits. But if you have a few extra minutes throughout your workout, throw in some of the dedicated grip training.

Your grip can handle it. The grip muscles in the hands and forearm are mostly slow-twitch fiber dominant, meaning they’re designed to go for long periods of exertion. They’re also gross movers, meaning you use them all the time for all sorts of tasks, and have been doing so for decades. To make them adapt, you need to stress the heck out of them with high weight. Train grip with high reps, heavy weights, and long durations. This is why deadlifts and farmer’s walks are so good for your grip—they force you to maintain that grip on a heavy bar or dumbbell for the entire duration of the set with little to no rest.

Oh, and pick up some Fat Gripz. These attach to dumbbells and barbells and increase the diameter of the bar, giving you less leverage when grabbing and forcing you to adapt to the new grip conditions by getting stronger.

Now, will all this grip training actually protect you from aging, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and early all-cause mortality? Maybe, maybe not.

But it—and the muscle and fitness you gain doing all these exercises—certainly doesn’t hurt.

How’s your grip? How’s your handshake? How long can you hang from a bar without letting go?

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care, be well, and go pick up and hold some heavy stuff.

(function($) { $("#df4n9a9").load("https://www.marksdailyapple.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=dfads_ajax_load_ads&groups=960&limit=1&orderby=random&order=ASC&container_id=&container_html=none&container_class=&ad_html=div&ad_class=&callback_function=&return_javascript=0&_block_id=df4n9a9" ); })( jQuery );

ga('send', { hitType: 'event', eventCategory: 'Ad Impression', eventAction: '67622' });

References:

Sasaki H, Kasagi F, Yamada M, Fujita S. Grip strength predicts cause-specific mortality in middle-aged and elderly persons. Am J Med. 2007;120(4):337-42.

Leong DP, Teo KK, Rangarajan S, et al. Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. Lancet. 2015;386(9990):266-73.

Rantanen T, Volpato S, Ferrucci L, Heikkinen E, Fried LP, Guralnik JM. Handgrip strength and cause-specific and total mortality in older disabled women: exploring the mechanism. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2003;51(5):636-41.

Van der kooi AL, Snijder MB, Peters RJ, Van valkengoed IG. The Association of Handgrip Strength and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Six Ethnic Groups: An Analysis of the HELIUS Study. PLoS ONE. 2015;10(9):e0137739.

Wen L, Shin MH, Kang JH, et al. Association between grip strength and hand and knee radiographic osteoarthritis in Korean adults: Data from the Dong-gu study. PLoS ONE. 2017;12(11):e0185343.

Lee MR, Jung SM, Bang H, Kim HS, Kim YB. The association between muscular strength and depression in Korean adults: a cross-sectional analysis of the sixth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES VI) 2014. BMC Public Health. 2018;18(1):1123.

Lee SH, Kim SJ, Han Y, Ryu YJ, Lee JH, Chang JH. Hand grip strength and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Korea: an analysis in KNHANES VI. Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2017;12:2313-2321.

Iconaru EI, Ciucurel MM, Georgescu L, Ciucurel C. Hand grip strength as a physical biomarker of aging from the perspective of a Fibonacci mathematical modeling. BMC Geriatr. 2018;18(1):296.

The post Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It published first on https://drugaddictionsrehab.tumblr.com/

[vsplusonline]

HCL Infosystems MD Raghavan Rangarajan quits

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/hcl-infosystems-md-raghavan-rangarajan-quits/

HCL Infosystems MD Raghavan Rangarajan quits

HCL Infosystems on Monday said its Managing Director Raghavan Rangarajan has resigned due to personal reasons. The company’s board has approved his resignation with effect from the closing hours of March 31, 2020, according to a BSE filing.

“Raghavan Rangarajan has expressed his intentions to step down from the position of the Managing Director of HCL Infosystems due to personal reasons,” the filing said.

In December quarter 2019, the company narrowed its loss to Rs 29.71 crore from Rs 62 crore in the same period a year ago.

The consolidated revenue from operations declined 6.5 per cent to Rs 1,139.36 crore during the quarter from Rs 1,218.79 crore in the year-ago period.

if(geolocation && geolocation != 5 && (typeof skip == 'undefined' || typeof skip.fbevents == 'undefined')) !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments); if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '338698809636220'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

Source link