Posts Tagged ‘environment’
How to raise your IQ: afford to live near a green space
The results of the survey are in. The greener the urban child’s world, the higher their IQ. Boffins have produced a paper which looked at linking access to parkland and gardens with doing well in intelligence tests. The work begins:
Exposure to green space has beneficial effects on several cognitive and behavioral aspects. However, to our knowledge, no study addressed intelligence as outcome. We investigated whether the level of urbanicity can modify the association of residential green space with intelligence and behavior in children.
The child in the high-rise apartment is not doing as well as the child living in a house by the park? The Telegraph sees the results:
Being raised in a greener environment boosts urban children’s intelligence and makes them better behaved, a study has found.
Researchers in Belgium found that living near parks, sports fields or community gardens raised city-dwelling children’s IQ levels and that they also exhibited less difficult behaviour. The paper, published in the journal Plos Medicine, found that an 3.3 per cent increase in green space within 3,000 metres of a child’s home was associated with a 2.6 point rise in overall IQ.
Got that? And then take a look at the property prices in you area and wonder why the people who earn the most money choose to live by the greener spaces. Is it because they have higher IQs? Or do they have more money and bigger incomes?
Trees get email in Melbourne
Can you hear the trees talking? No. Maybe you should try writing to them. It turns out that trees love to email:
SOME might think they are barking mad, but sappy Melburnians have started emailing trees.
And sometimes they reply.
In what is believed to be a world first, Melbourne City Council says all of its 70,000 trees can be contacted and wants more people to join the “correspondence program” set up to connect people with the green environment.
So far, emails seen by the Herald Sun include conversations about moving overseas, Melbourne’s weather and even the Brownlow.
One emailer told a tree: “I am stuck inside and am so jealous of you soaking up the sun. You seem to be having a ball out there.”
The Chinese elm replied: “Sorry that you are stuck inside. I am really enjoying stretching my stomata and giving my chloroplasts a good workout. I spent the weekend well hydrated and preparing for the summer ahead.”
No word from the Christmas trees yet…
