Health

Scientists keep leaning forward every time the music starts

Behind all that feel-good is some genuinely hard science.

When David Byrne played a sold-out show in Los Angeles last fall, the crowd stayed on its feet for nearly two hours, swept up in the kind of joy most adults forget they are allowed to feel. That was a great night out. What scientists have started to argue is that it might also count as treatment.

As Michaela Haas reports, modern research is stacking up behind a claim that sounds like wishful thinking: dance is medicine. It builds strength and balance like any workout, but the neurologists are the ones leaning forward. One widely cited study found that people who danced more than once a week had a 76% lower risk of dementia, an edge reported as stronger than the one you get from popular brain games.

The most striking evidence comes from a Brooklyn studio, where a program called Dance for PD has spent a quarter century teaching people with Parkinson's to turn tremor into choreography. Dancers who arrive with their shoulders caved inward leave standing taller. One participant put it simply: "I sometimes cannot walk, but I can dance."

For everyone else, whatever makes dance work against depression, against loneliness, against the drift of an ordinary hard week, is the same thing that keeps people coming back for years, long after most exercise habits fall apart. Researchers have a single word for it. It is not fitness, and it is not willpower.

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And what did we learn?

The European Broadcasting Union is trying to take some of the ick out of women’s sports coverage, as our Erik Barnes reported yesterday.

On the topic of women in sports, when women made their Olympic debut in 1900, they participated in just five sports. Did GOOD readers pick golf out of my clever fake answers as one of those five? Only 28% did, with most of you guessing synchronized swimming. The official first five sports were: tennis, golf, sailing, croquet, and equestrianism.

• Golf (28.1%) ⭐

• Synchronized swimming (53.9%)

• Shot put (9.2%)

• Trampoline (8.8%)

GOOD reader Dcamyot wrote the explanation for my fakes for me. Love it! “Synchronized swimming for women didn’t start until 1984. Shot put for women began in 1948 and Women’s trampoline was initiated in 2000.”

Research

Loneliness works less like a passing mood and more like thirst

Scientists found the part of your brain that gets hungry for people.

When a mouse who's been isolated for five days reunites with her sister, she chatters in squeaks too high for us to hear, then crawls underneath her sister's body as if angling for a hug. As Elizabeth Preston reports, neuroscientists now think the craving for company is a genuine biological need, wired as deep as hunger or thirst. Park a person alone for 10 hours and their brain lights up at photos of people laughing in the exact spot a fasting brain lights up at food. Though the sweet spot differs for everyone: "you can feel lonely at a party, or you can feel fine alone in your office."

When scientists separated mice who could still see, hear, and smell each other, the animals reacted as if they were totally alone. Only one sense broke the spell: touch. A tunnel lined with soft cloth calmed isolated mice like a weighted blanket, which starts to explain why a text never quite lands the way a dance class or a room full of people does. Now one lab is chasing the same answer in the world's cuddliest, strangest rodent.

Care

The ideal shower is shorter than your patience for this heat wave

You only need soap in three places, and everyone's arguing about it.

It's hot out there, and it may be tempting to park yourself under a cool stream until the heat wave passes. Maybe not so fast. As Cecily Knobler reports, some doctors now think the ideal shower is even shorter than the eight minutes most Americans clock. The new target? Five minutes, seven at the very most. Anything longer, and you're mostly just running up the water bill and drying out your skin.

The environmental math is stark. At 2.5 gallons a minute, the average eight-minute shower burns through 20 gallons, so trimming a couple of minutes adds up fast, a small conservation win anyone can pull off. But the dermatologists have opinions that go beyond the water meter. One NYU Langone doctor suggests most people don't even need a daily rinse, and offered a line that's been quietly rearranging people's entire routines: "In general, you really only need soap in your armpits, your groin, and your feet."

Not everyone is buying it. Reddit, predictably, revolted. One user reported showering for "light years" (a distance, not a duration, as a helpful commenter noted), while others measured their time in Spotify songs, shower beers, or, more tenderly, the length of a rough day. The science of small daily habits says the short shower is smarter. Your comfort may have other plans.

On July 16, 1935, the world's first parking meter blinked to life on the corner of First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City, and drivers have been grumbling about it ever since. The man behind it was Carl Magee, a newspaperman with a wild backstory. He had helped expose the Teapot Dome scandal and once stood trial for shooting at a judge. Asked to fix downtown parking chaos, he built the Park-O-Meter instead.

The problem was real. Workers grabbed the best curb spots at dawn and squatted all day, leaving shoppers circling the block. Magee's fix was pure elegance: rent the pavement by the hour. A nickel bought sixty minutes, and by the end of that first day, 175 meters lined fourteen blocks.

Oklahomans were not charmed. Some called paying to park downright un-American. One man tied his horse to a meter in protest, and four others set up a card table in a paid spot for a leisurely hour of bridge. The lawsuits followed close behind.

They lost. By the end of the 1940s, more than 100,000 meters had spread across American cities, and today the humble coin-fed timer underpins a multibillion-dollar industry. Not bad for a device nobody asked for, and everybody resents. 

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