Table of contents for August / September 2023 in Readers Digest Australia

Wily Weka ROBIN KEOWN In 2014 we moved to Golden Bay on the South Island of New Zealand and were amazed and enchanted by the bird life. The weka, who live on the ground, had just returned after a long period of decimation. To the dismay of many of our neighbours, who did not have fenced vegetable gardens, numbers were building up and they grew to dislike the creatures who raided and destroyed their plants. We were fortunate to have a chicken wire enclosure around our vegetable garden, so we never had this problem. In fact, we used to feed morsels of food to the cheeky weka which came near the house. This, however, was short-lived. They grew bolder and would come inside where they deposited their impossible-to-remove ‘calling cards’…

If you feel that making friends as an adult isn’t easy, you’re right. “As kids, we have recess and gym class. We can let our guard down,” says Marisa G. Franco, author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help Us Make and Keep Friends. According to sociologists, these repeated, unplanned interactions and opportunities for vulnerability are necessary for creating the bonds of friendship. Given today’s workfrom-home reality, those options are fewer than ever. “And even those of us who see our colleagues every day aren’t letting our guard down,” adds Franco. In the US, for example, a 2021 survey by the American Enterprise Institute, found that the number of people who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, going from three to 12 per cent.…

Fascia is possibly the most prevalent tissue in the body. Exactly how much of it we have hasn’t been measured, but it’s everywhere, supporting the skin and covering muscles, nerves and organs. Despite this, until recently, this white stringy substance was seen as so irrelevant to health that doctors would throw it away during anatomy lessons. “But in ten to 15 years, I think we’re going to look at that as like trying to examine the body and leaving out the liver,” says Professor Carla Stecco from the University of Padova in Italy, one of the world’s leading investigators into the role of the fascia. “We have a huge amount of fascia in our body and to ignore that tissue and its role in the function of the muscles, organs…

1 You might consider taking the train for your next getaway. After all, you’ll see only clouds at 35,000 feet – if you’re lucky. Europeans built the earliest rails in mines in the 16th century, with men or horses providing the power. The first steam engine operated in Wales in 1804. Perhaps this is why the Brits are loco for locomotives: in the UK, at least 20 magazines are published about them. 2 The US has the world’s largest rail network at nearly 225,310 kilometres of track. 3 Today’s fastest trains travel close to 321 km/h. Sometimes called bullet trains (most famous among them Japan’s Shinkansen lines), many are powered on electricity. But the fastest of them all, the Shanghai Mag-lev in China, uses the attraction and repulsion forces of…

Arab? Yes, I’m an Arab. Just look at my nose.” The small woman raises her chin to the sun so that I can study her pronounced profile. She laughs out loud when she turns back to me with her mascara-lined dark eyes, her wild curls and the amber-coloured skin that underlines her genetic roots. But she’s not called Fatima or Jameela. She’s Silvia. And she lives in a cave in Spain. Silvia was born in a cave, much like the one she showed me earlier this morning, when we met on a dusty hillside just outside the city of Guadix, some 50 kilometres northeast of Granada, in Andalucia, the southern-most of Spain’s 17 autonomous regions. It was a shallow cave with small rooms and an oven and old wooden furniture.…

Most of us look forward to the weekend as a time to relax, connect with friends and family, and tackle items from a to-do list that gets neglected during the work-week. But as the weekend comes to an end, many of us are missing out on Sunday Funday and instead experiencing a looming sense of anxiety and even dread about the upcoming week. Experts have dubbed this existential worry the ‘Sunday scaries’. Polls say 75 per cent to 80 per cent of people experience these Sunday scaries, says therapist Amanda Stemen. “The Sunday scaries is an overwhelming feeling of dread and anxiety about going to work or school the next day,” says clinical psychologist Renée Goff. And it can be experienced physically as well as mentally. “Some people describe it…

Years ago, I lived beside a pessimistic 70-year-old Irish man named Steve who told me he hadn’t had any friends since quitting his factory job 20 years earlier. The bowling league, pub visits and card games had all withered. Steve sat on his deck all day. Across the street was 70-year-old Werner. Weather permitting, Werner sat on a battered La-Z-Boy recliner he’d set up on his lawn. The two men stared at one another but rarely talked. When Steve collapsed on his deck, Werner watched as the ambulance crew tried to revive him. I went to Steve’s funeral, a subdued event (there were just four of us, including a priest who hadn’t met him), and thought about the nature of male relationships. Steve and Werner are a handy metaphor for…

That Beats All Many years ago, my grandfather taught carpentry at a technical college, and part of his job involved proctoring written exams. During one of these exams, a couple of students were tapping their pens quite loudly. On the face of it, this wasn’t so unusual; plenty of people in exams tap pens, drum fingers, etc, as an aid to memory – or at least, they certainly did when I took my exams. These taps, however, seemed rather more… well, rhythmic. A few taps later, Grandfather – who was in the naval cadets as a boy – realised that these two students were using their pens to tap out the answers to various questions in Morse code. Without saying a word, Grandfather picked up a pen of his own,…

Crossword Test your general knowledge. ACROSS 2 Laboratory glassware (4,5) 8 Entreaty (4) 9 Mesopotamia was here (4) 10 Middle East expert (7) 11 US small truck (4-2) 12 Employs (4) 14 They come by the dozen (4) 15 American vulture (6) 16 Frizzy hairdo (4) 18 More mature (5) 21 Bring together (5) 23 Have a taste (3,2) 25 Water lily (5) 28 Without purpose (4) 29 Land surrounded by water (6) 31 US Great Lake (4) 32 ‘Shane’ director (4) 35 A lure for bees (6) 36 Sticks like glue (7) 37 Sudden assault (4) 38 Intonation (4) 39 Gastric (9) DOWN 1 Abnormally white (6) 2 Discussed (6-2) 3 1960s singer of Walkin’ Back to Happiness (7) 4 How critical things may come (2,1,4) 5 Conveyor (7)…

Before I had turned ten, I had lost both my parents. My four brothers and two sisters left Hyderabad after being adopted by relatives, but I insisted on staying behind as I wanted to continue with my education there. I lived alone in a room that a family member had allowed me to use rent-free: I got this privilege as I was a good student. And to support myself and my education, I had taken to delivering newspapers. I would be up every morning by 5am and walk five kilometres from Kachiguda, where I lived, to the newspaper office in Troop’s Bazaar. By 6am, I would collect 50 copies of Manzil (Urdu Daily) – the bundle must have weighed over five kilograms. My beat spanned three kilometres, from Moazzam Jahi…

Fantasy Mother When my daughter started primary school, she made some new friends in her class and they soon started to go to each other’s houses after school. The other mums in this playdate circle were lovely. Exceptionally so. Every time I picked my daughter up from one of their homes, they made a point of saying what a delightful child she was, what a great job I was doing with her and how lucky she was to have me. It was nice of them to say so, I thought, but really a little over-the-top. I was just doing what mums do, wasn’t I? Eventually I pointed this out to one of the mums. She patted me on the arm. “Yes, you’re doing exactly what her real mum would have wanted…

Skeleton Sledding First and foremost, this extreme sport requires courage. After all, skeleton riders hurtle down an ice channel head first while lying on their bellies. The sport owes its somewhat macabre name to the sleds used. These consist largely of a metal frame reminiscent of a skeleton. On their slide, which can reach speeds of up to 145 km/h, athletes such as Austrian Janine Flock – shown here at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing – steer by shifting pressure with their legs and shoulders.…

FOOD Keep Bananas Fresh Can’t use the whole bunch yet? Rather than having to throw out a few that end up getting too ripe, put them in the refrigerator when they have started to soften. The cold will help bananas stay at their peak for another week. That said, avoid refrigerating bananas that aren’t quite ripe, as it will stop the natural ripening process. Get More Juice From A Lemon Pop any citrus fruit in the microwave and you’ll not only make it easier to squeeze, but you’ll also get more juice overall. Microwave for 10 to 30 seconds, depending on the fruit’s size – a large grapefruit will need longer than a lemon – and be sure to let the fruit cool before handling it. Put Extra Wine To…

QUESTIONS 1 The blueprint of every human being is in their DNA: around 23,000 genes located on 23 pairs of chromosomes. How many genes does a water flea have? a) 310b) 3100c) 31,000d) 310,000 2 When you breathe through your nose, the air is cleaned and tempered. That’s another reason why when we experience a cold and our nasal passages become blocked, it can be particularly uncomfortable. How do nasal passages work when both are free from blockage? a) simultaneouslyb) alternately every several hoursc) the right one during the day and the left one at nightd) the left one during the day and the right one at night 3 Reader’s Digest has known it for a long time: Laughter is the best medicine. In fact, this is scientifically proven. What…

It is a dangerous experiment. In 1947, natural scientist Thor Heyerdahl (above) and five companions set sail from Peru on a wooden raft. Their destination: Polynesia, some 7000 kilometres away. Heyerdahl wants to prove that the island world in the Pacific was originally settled from South America. Experts ridicule the Norwegian. Recent genetic analyses, however, have shone a new light on the adventure. WITHIN MINUTES, the calm waters of the Pacific Ocean around the Kon-Tiki have turned into a stormy sea: dark clouds chase across the sky. Powerful waves lift the raft by five or six metres, then abruptly send it plummeting into deep, blue-black valleys. It lurches in the wind. And the logs from which the raft is built move against each other. Thor Heyerdahl, the 32-year-old Norwegian leader…