A new «Glosa Informative» delivery, in which you can find the most interesting pieces of news of this week.
Donald Trump tested COVID-19 positive
US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania tested COVID-19 positive on October 1st. The news came out just two days after a heated television debate with his rival in the presidential election campaign, Joe Biden who tested negative.
The event generated alarm and shock in the troubled American society, which on November 3rd must go to the polls to choose the next president of the United Stated, in a context of serious economic crisis and internal turmoil as well as the pandemic framework. Polls show Trump losing to his Democratic rival, although in recent weeks he managed to shorten the gap that separates him from Biden.
According to reports from the presidential medical team, Trump and his wife experienced «mild symptoms» of the disease and were hospitalised on Friday at Walter Reed Military Hospital. Over the last hours, the president’s health has improved, and he is working in isolation from the hospital offices. However, the campaign meetings – criticised for being massive and generally practised without a mask or social distance – were suspended indefinitely. Both Biden and other figures in the Democratic party called for overcoming differences and wished the president gets better soon.
Study shows bilingualism protects against cognitive decline
According to a research Paper published by researchers from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the Pompeu Fabra University, the fact of speaking two languages actively and fluently helps prevent and delay the onset of cognitive impairment diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. Among the main conclusions of the research, it stands out that in those regions or countries where more than one language is spoken, cases of dementia are up to 50% lower than in monolingual regions.
Although previously there was evidence that the acquisition of a second language helps to maintain mental functions in an optimal state, the novelty of this study consists in establishing a “gradient” of bilingualism. In this way, a person who speaks only one language and is exposed to another will not have the same chances as one who is fluent in both languages on a regular basis.
The study was carried out in the Barcelona region, known for being an area of relative bilingualism where both Spanish and Catalan are spoken. People from three different groups were compared: healthy individuals, people with mild cognitive impairment, and patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The conclusions showed that those people who during their lives had developed a more fluid relationship with both languages, learning them at an early age and using them on a daily basis, had taken more years to experience memory loss and other associated cognitive disorders. In this way, the fact that acquiring and regularly practicing a second language prevents and delays cognitive impairments is reinforced.
Quino, Mafalda´s creator, has passed away
Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, well- known by his pseudonym “Quino”, died on September 30th at the age of 88, as a result of complications typical of age. The cartoonist was the creator of the popular character «Mafalda», which was published from 1964 to 1973 and became the best-selling Latin American cartoon in history.
Quino was born in 1932 in Mendoza Province. He was the son of an Andalusian married couple. In 1950 he moved to Buenos Aires, where he began to draw for several media and, in 1964, his most famous creation saw the light: Mafalda, an 8-year-old girl living in San Telmo, bohemian neighborhood of Buenos Aires, was a girl who questioned injustices and inequalities of the world at that time, many of them still in force today. The sharp criticisms of Mafalda, her vocation for a world in peace, her call to rebellion typical of the 1960s and the social changes that the planet was experiencing at that time popularized the character and turned it into an international icon of non-conformity as well as an exponent of the inequalities that still persist today.
Upon learning about Quino’s death, the social networks started to pay tributes to the artist, while some people approached the statue of Mafalda in the San Telmo to express their sadness and leave offerings in homage to her creator.
Finally, Google Meet tool still for free
After several weeks of give-and-take negotiations, Google decided to extend the free version of Google Meet to March 2021, allowing unlimited calls and other features to that date. The decision came after the rejection generated by the announcement to restrict the most used tools on the platform from October, in the context of a pandemic that forces the virtualisation of almost all activities.
Although Google Meet existed before the pandemic, it was not until May of this year that it could only be accessed through business accounts and not for free. The virtualisation of activities accelerated by the pandemic led the computing giant to compete with other platforms such as Zoom, which is why the service was enabled for free for individual accounts. Thus, you can access meetings of up to 24 hours and 250 participants, in addition to the possibility of transmitting to 10,000 people at the same time. These possibilities were quickly exploited in many educational and business environments, which were to be drastically affected by the decision to restrict both the duration of free calls and the number of participants.
Since users were highly dissatisfied, Google decided to postpone the changes to March 2021, considered a more favourable moment in the evolution of the pandemic.
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Gracias a Lucio Maciá por la nota, a Araceli Sabransky por el armado de las historias para instagram, Cecilia Musis por la traducción y a Christian Trappani por la organización.