Prioritize special education in 2025
Source by Jessika Harkay | January 2, 2025
For members of the legislature’s Education Committee, the 2025 legislative session will bring back perennial debates over funding, classroom safety and teacher hiring and retention. But this year, committee leaders have also pledged to make concerted efforts to address special education funding and services — costs that can account for as much as a quarter or more of some public school districts’ budgets.
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On any given day, millions of people in the U.S. are trying to lose weight. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that a little over 40% of adults in the U.S. have obesity. And a new report in the Lancet shows a stunning rise in obesity since 1990 among all ages and finds that 3 in 4 adults aged 25 and older in the U.S. are overweight or obese. Having obesity or being overweight can increase the risk of many chronic diseases and health issues, including joint problems, hypertension, high cholesterol, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and certain cancers.

People’s perceptions about their food experiences are valuable because they are related to their quality of life: Individuals who feel positively about these different aspects of the food they recently ate not only are more likely to have higher levels of wellbeing but also tend to feel more socially connected or attached to their community.
In a new study, researchers in Sweden used artificial intelligence and brain scans to determine whether there was any connection between older adults’ lifestyles and their brain health.Having a larger brain age gap was associated with inflammation, changes in white matter, and other indications of poor brain health, which raise the risk of cognitive decline.231