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Maintaining healthy brain function is no secret, an MIT professor and expert who focuses on diseases such as Alzheimer’s has said.

“People actually know what they should be doing” to preserve their memory, neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, who directs The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, said.

“I think that if you just keep a routine, you know, you do it,” Tsai told Insider. “I mean, I think that’s the only way to do it.”

“I think people actually know what they should be doing to stay healthy and to preserve their memory,” he pointed out.

Individuals with a healthier lifestyle had slower memory decline compared to those who did not, a British Medical Journal study that followed 30,000 people in China for 10 years recently revealed .

For the study, experts looked at habits such as whether people had a healthy diet, if they exercised regularly, whether they have regular social contact, how their cognitive activities are and if they abstained from smoking and alcohol.

Speaking of how she maintains her brain functions personally, Tsai said: “I just have to really discipline myself.”

“For instance, exercise in the winter: it’s really painful when you look at outside temperature below zero and there’s ice and snow on the ground. I just try to discipline myself.”

Earlier this month, the BMC Medicine journal published the findings of scientists who found the food types that can reduce chances of dementia by up to 23 per cent.

The findings are based on data from more than 60,000 individuals from the UK Biobank – an online database of medical and lifestyle records of more than half a million Britons.

“Our study suggests that eating a more Mediterranean-like diet could be one strategy to help individuals lower their risk of dementia ,” said Oliver Shannon, lecturer in human nutrition and ageing at Newcastle University.

What Boris Johnson said: Thank you Mr Speaker for granting me the opportunity first to pay tribute to the men and women of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who have done an outstanding job for the last two years.

What he really meant: They managed to put up with me as their boss.

What he said: None of this would have been possible without the support of my right honourable friend the prime minister. Everyone who has worked with her will recognise her courage and resilience.

What he meant: She had the courage to ignore the advice I gave her and she even survived my resignation, which would have been a devastating blow to a lesser person.

What he said: A vision that she set out with such clarity at Lancaster House last year: a country eager, as she said, not just to do a bold, ambitious and comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU, out of the customs union, out of the single market, but also to do new free trade deals around the world.

What he meant: Once we were hand in glove. Almost lovers. When she agreed with me she was magnificent.

What he said: But in the 18 months that have followed, it is as though a fog of self-doubt has descended.

What he meant: Now she knows me not. I guessed something was wrong when she avoided my glances. Without me, she looked lost.

What he said: Even the commentators liked the Lancaster House vision. And the markets liked it. As my right honourable friend the chancellor I’m sure observed, the pound soared.

What he meant: Even my bitterest rival, Philip Hammond, would have had to admit that Theresa and I made a great couple. I bet he was envious of my success.

What he said: We never actually turned that vision into a negotiating position in Brussels.

What he meant: That was because it was a lot of grand-sounding waffle, and every time the prime minister asked for detailed policy papers the line to Kabul or the Caribbean went all crackly.

What he said: Instead we dithered, we burned through our negotiating capital.

What he meant: She dithered, and I realised she had never really been into me. All the negotiating capital was in good order when I put it in the bank before I went off to attend to urgent business abroad.

What he said: Worst of all, we allowed the question of the Northern Irish border, which had hitherto been assumed on all sides to be readily soluble, to become so politically charged as to dominate the debate.

What he meant: Worst of all, people keep banging on about the stupid border just because they know I don’t have a solution to it.

What he said: My right honourable friend the chancellor was asked to identify the biggest single opportunity from Brexit. After some thought, he said regulatory innovation. Well, there may be some regulatory innovation post-Brexit, but it won’t be, alas, coming from the UK.

What he meant: You don’t really need a translation for this bit, do you? Hammond, eh? What does he know?

What he said: The result of accepting the EU rulebooks, and the fantastical Heath Robinson customs arrangement, is that we have much less scope to do free trade deals.

What he meant: Heath Robinson. He was a cartoonist. Jolly funny actually.

What he said: If we pretend otherwise, we continue to make the fatal mistake of underestimating the intelligence of the public: saying one thing to the EU about what we are doing and saying another to the electorate.

What he meant: A bit like saying we would lie down in front of the bulldozers to oppose a new runway and then trying to keep your job by leaving the country when it came to a decision.

What he said: Given that, in important ways, this is Bino, or Brino, or Brexit In Name Only, I am of course unable to support it, as I said in the cabinet session at Chequers.

What he meant: She says I supported it at Chequers. I mean, honestly, who do you want to believe? I almost resigned on the spot.

What he said: It is not too late to save Brexit. We have time in these negotiations. We have changed tack once and we can change again.

What he meant: It is not too late to save my leadership ambitions. My ratings have been on the slide for two years, but this is a really good speech. I’ve worked on it all morning. I can turn this round.

What he said: It is absolute nonsense to imagine, as I fear some of my colleagues do, that we can somehow afford to make a botched treaty now and then break and reset the bone later on.

What he meant: Michael Gove, you betrayed me once, I will not allow you to do that again, with your idea that what matters is to get out of the EU and sort out the problems later.

What he said: We have seen even in these talks how the supposedly provisional becomes eternal.

What he meant: I thought Theresa would be a temporary leader but she’s still there. Unbelievable.

What he said: Let us again aim explicitly for that glorious vision of Lancaster House, a strong, independent self-governing Britain that is open to the world, not the miserable permanent limbo of Chequers. Not the democratic disaster of ongoing harmonisation with no way out and no say for the UK.

What he meant: She has led me up the garden path for two years and I’ve only just realised it.

In the moment when Theresa May allowed her emotion to show while signing off her resignation announcement this morning, she did more for women than she has over her entire political career.

Hearing her voice crack when she said running the country she loves has been “the honour of my life”, it was difficult not to feel sad about the fact that another woman’s time at the helm of the country was over – not to mention the fact that her tumultuous time in office will inevitably be used against other women in politics in the future.

Before you accuse me of sympathy: no, I don’t feel sorry for Theresa May. She cried only for herself – not for Grenfell or Windrush or the homeless, not for the domestic violence shelters which were closed down on her watch, the Northern Irish women who suffered because of the DUP’s draconian stance on abortion, or the immigrant women detained in Yarl’s Wood – and it will take decades to turn back the clock on that dismal record, no matter how hard she tries to push the “second-ever female PM” line.

But that moment at the conclusion of her resignation speech was like watching a woman shake off the patriarchal shackles she’s been chained with for more than two years, and finally exhaling. It was poignant, and perhaps even relatable, for all women to see the prime minister show – not through coughing fits, embarrassing Mamma Mia! dance routines or by reminiscing about running through fields of wheat – that she’s just another human being, and it hasn’t been easy.

Emotion has been weaponised against women since time immemorial, especially in the political sphere. Our wombs make us irrational, we’ve been told; our hormones make us weak. Remember when Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt said women shouldn’t be allowed to work in laboratories because, “when you criticise them, they cry”? And it makes no difference whether we actually cry or whether we merely assert ourselves: studies have shown that men who react to situations with anger are celebrated, and women who do the same are penalised.

For women to cry, historically, is for women to prove misogyny right, to prove that we cannot hack it – we are too vulnerable. But to subscribe to this “do as the boys do” model of lean-in feminism damages men just as much as women. It says that toxic masculinity is the norm, and demands that emotionality and rationality are seen as mutually exclusive states, rather than often complementary.

Nowadays men are often celebrated for crying or talking about their emotions (which, for the record, I support) but May has been torn apart for it. She’s been ridiculed across the internet for those final moments, when she finally lost her composure because – let’s face it – she really, actually cared.

Of course May isn’t the first politician to show emotion (Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and even Margaret Thatcher all had their moments), but these tears felt much more genuine than the politically convenient crocodile tears adopted in an opportune moment. She was done fighting, her defence mechanisms abandoned; she had nothing more to give. The only thing she had left to give the country was a poignant, impassioned acknowledgement that she had, ultimately, failed in an office she held in extremely high esteem.

Paparazzi have swarmed to capture a shot of May looking sad, “feeling the strain”, but this wasn’t a moment caught off-guard in the back of a car. May allowed us to see this. She allowed us to dwell on it as a cynical Conservative leadership with Boris Johnson as the frontrunner cranks into gear.

Let’s rewind back to the final moments of May’s predecessor. Leaving the country completely in the lurch following a referendum conducted for party political interests, David Cameron lit the match and walked away. The hollowness of his words were exposed when a microphone left on gave us a glimpse into his mindset as he sung himself a jaunty tune while sauntering cocksure back into 10 Downing Street.

May has faced vitriol like only a woman in her position could: the price and style of her clothes dissected, her legs compared with the first minister of Scotland’s, her moments of steadfast resolve recharacterised as “robotic”. She has undoubtedly suffered gender discrimination, whether or not she has acted as a feminist herself (again: she hasn’t.) But this isn’t about forgiveness. It’s acknowledging that people hate strong women – people within her own party made no secret of their dislike for “the Maybot” – and they love to see them break. May took control of that narrative and, instead of allowing crowing pundits to say she’d “proved her femaleness” or “finally cracked”, proved she still had some integrity.

May had a normal human reaction to a moment she’s spent desperately (and often stubbornly) trying to avoid – and she made no attempt to repress it. I might not agree with her politics, but at least she was steadfast. Will we be able to say the same for the person waiting next in line?

Calls for a nation-wide ban on the social media platform TikTok are increasing—across both political parties in the U.S. I built my career criticizing TikTok, but Washington has this wrong. I produced some of the earliest research into mis- and disinformation and extremism on TikTok. I have spent countless hours tearing my hair out in frustration over the company’s inability to control misinformation and hate speech on its platform. But I will still be the first to say that banning TikTok is a reckless decision that would ultimately harm the most marginalized in society.

I research information ecosystems on TikTok for a living, but I’m also a TikToker. I have over half a million followers on the platform, and I, like roughly one-third of my fellow Americans, love a good scroll. I speak to this issue as a Gen Z misinformation researcher who has testified to the U.K. Parliament and as a content creator who would be affected by a TikTok ban.

We call TikTok “social media,” but really it’s best thought of as user-generated television. TikTok users create content which is distributed to other users via the recommendation algorithm, and TikTok rakes in an astronomical profit by selling ads in between those videos. TikTok’s algorithm keeps users watching so that they can consume more advertisements, but fundamentally, the platform is only as strong as its user base.

And TikTok has made it easier to be a content creator than ever before. The app facilitates filming, editing, and reacting to other videos, and gives users the potential to achieve virality.

This democratization of content creation has created a culture on the platform that embraces a bottom-up information ecosystem. On TikTok, you’re more likely to encounter firsthand accounts of news stories than a fact-checked and polished video from a legacy news company.

As I’ve pointed out at great length, this bottom-up ecosystem has its drawbacks, notably the proliferation of misinformation, hate speech, and harassment. But it also allows for voices previously excluded from the media to reach unprecedented audiences. And users quickly figured out that they could use the platform for activism.

In June of 2020, TikTok became a hub for Black Lives Matter protests . Videos from the front lines of protests flooded users’ feeds. We could see the violence, the comradery, the strategies used in cities around the world. And we could organize. I watched as a creator got arrested walking home from a protest while livestreaming. Immediately, a GoFundMe was organized to pay her bail.

From bomb shelters in Ukraine to protests in Iran , TikTok became a space for virtual activism driven by two major forces: firsthand accounts from people affected by political issues—wars, climate change, police brutality, authoritarian regimes—and the rise of activist-influencers.

While the term “influencer” was originally coined to refer to the market power of people with large social media accounts, the term has taken on a broader meaning. TikTok influencers are no longer seen as valuable just for selling products; rather, they are valuable because they can be trusted messengers to their communities.

I understand the privacy concerns stemming from reporting that TikTok has been weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party to gather data from Americans. But banning TikTok is like applying a dirty, used Band-Aid to the gaping wound that is our broken digital privacy status quo. It would do little to protect the data of Americans but it would cause a host of new problems.

To address this problem at its core, we must regulate the use of data. Why should Google , Meta , and Twitter get a free pass because they’re not Chinese-owned?

If we ban TikTok, the channels of communication that have been steadily established over the last half of this decade will cease to exist, leaving some of the most marginalized in our country suddenly in the dark.

The U.S. is at a crossroads. We could dismantle a massive piece of communications infrastructure used by young people, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color, exacerbating existing inequalities in information access. Or alternatively, Congress could implement legislation that serves to protect the digital privacy and safety of all Americans on all platforms.

It’s clear what the path forward should be.

Abbie Richards is a TikToker and TikTok misinformation researcher who specializes in understanding how misinformation, conspiracy theories, and extremism spread on TikTok. Her published research can be found here . Richards has amassed a multi-platform following of over half a million people who are interested in learning about these issues and is also a co-founder of EcoTok, an environmental TikTok collective that specializes in social media-based climate communication. For her work as an online educator, Richards was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 2023 cohort.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.