Pope Francis is wrapping up the first-ever papal visit to Mongolia

Researchers found that sharks around Florida behaved strangely and hypothesized that may be due to drugs being dumped in the sea there

Shifting to a healthier diet – and sticking to it – can add almost a decade to life for middle-aged people, a new study finds. The research published earlier this week in the journal Nature Food, assessed the health data of nearly half a million British residents whose eating habits have been documented as part of the UK biobank study. Researchers grouped 467,354 participants based on their eating habits and observed how these changed over time. Participants were grouped as either average and unhealthy eaters, or as people with food intake matching the UK’s Eatwell Guide and those whose diet matched what the researchers called the “longevity diet”. Currently, the UK population has a life expectancy at birth of about 84 years for women and 80 years for men. Adjusting for other contributing factors like smoking, alcohol, and physical activity, the study found that 40-year-old men and women who changed from an unhealthy diet to eating healthier food, and adhered to it, gained almost 9 to 10 years in life expectancy. “Here, using a prospective population-based cohort data from the UK Biobank, we show that sustained dietary change from unhealthy dietary patterns to the Eatwell Guide dietary recommendations is associated with 8.9 and 8.6 years gain in life expectancy for 40-year-old males and females, respectively,” scientists, including those from the University of Bergen in Norway, wrote. “In the same population, sustained dietary change from unhealthy to longevity-associated dietary patterns is associated with 10.8 and 10.4 years gain in life expectancy in males and females, respectively,” they added. Researchers say the longest gains in life expectancy were made by those changing their diets to consume more whole grains, nuts and fruits and less sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meats. Those who initially followed an average diet and later changed to healthier eating habits were found to have smaller life expectancy gains. “The bigger the changes made towards healthier dietary patterns, the larger the expected gains in life expectancy are,” researchers explained. The life expectancy gains also seemed to be lower when the diet change was initiated at older ages, but even these are substantial, scientists say. For instance, they say, even 70-year-olds can manage to extend their life expectancy by 4 or 5 years if they make a sustained diet change. The latest findings point to government actions that could contribute to people’s health improvements in the UK, such as health-oriented food taxes, improving food environments in school and working places, as well as subsidies to reduce the cost of healthy foods. “Such policy measures, informed by the up-to-date estimates on potential gains in life expectancy that we provide in this paper, could guide the deployment of resources to improve healthy eating patterns across the population,” researchers added. Read More Smoking causes 150 cancer cases every single day in UK, study finds Binman shoots first Hollywood film after chat with Mark Wahlberg changed his life ‘I could have gone blind if I hadn’t been able to go private’ ‘I could have gone blind if I hadn’t been able to go private’ Paul Rudd says ‘horrible’ Marvel diet left him drinking sparkling water as ‘reward’ How to celebrate Thanksgiving when you’re not close to your family

WASHINGTON Sales of new U.S. single-family homes jumped to a 13-month high in April, boosted by a persistent

By Aziz El Yaakoubi RIYADHSyrian President Bashar al-Assad, a pariah for more than a decade, is expected to

The Senate is heading for a vote on a temporary government funding package as lawmakers sought to keep the holiday season free from any suspense over a government shutdown

Congress should stay out of the Supreme Court's business and stop trying to impose ethics rules on justices and clerks, Justice Samuel Alito said in an interview published by The Wall Street Journal editorial page Friday.

A researcher has figured out that the Earth’s first continent was formed 3bn years ago, in a new paper that sheds fresh light on the early stages of the planet’s life. Jane Greaves, an astronomy professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University in Wales, was examining continent formation on distant stars and planets. It is thought that exoplanets with continents that formed in a similar way to Earth’s are more likely to be habitable, and perhaps even contain alien life. In the process, she calculated when several distant planets’ continents were born, as well as those a little closer to home. Continents on Earth sit on top of the planet’s hot, viscous mantle. Heat from the inner core stops the mantle from solidifying. The reason the core is hot is because it contains radioactive elements that came from neutron star collisions billions of years ago such as forms of Uranium, Thorium and Potassium. By analysing how many materials like this are present on Earth and on other planets, we are also able to estimate when the continents formed. On Earth, that was about 9.5 billion years since the beginning of the universe. Meanwhile, in Greaves' sample, the first continents appeared 2bn years before Earth’s on the exoplanets of younger, so-called thin disk stars. Older, thick disk stars analysed in her work produced rocky planets with continents that appeared even earlier: about 4 to 5bn years before Earth’s. “The outlook seems very promising for finding rocky exoplanets with continents, given that nearby Sun-like stars have already produced a few candidate hosts,” she wrote. The study, “When were the First Exocontinents?” is published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical SocietySign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Vital aid began crossing into Gaza from Egypt for the first time since the Israel-Hamas war erupted two

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