Starting on a high note
Marking their silver jubilee, the 25th Festival of Youth Orchestras will see young musicians from across Ireland gather in the National Concert Hall next month.
Presented by the Irish Association of Youth Orchestras, the festival is the annual celebration of youth orchestras in Ireland, and their members, with a diverse variety of music played by young people, for young people, from the standard classical repertoire to music from the movies, pop tunes arranged for orchestra, Irish traditional, and new music by Irish composers.
The 25th Festival will feature classics such as Ravel’s Boléro, Greig’s In the Hall of the Mountain Kings, two movements of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6 ‘Pathétique’ and the lively Lord of the Dance by Ronan Hardiman, along with performances of music from The Avengers and pop classics.
It takes place on Saturday, February 8, in the National Concert Hall at 3pm and 8pm.
Smoking into depression
It’s widely known how corrosive smoking cigarettes can be for your physical health, but a new study argues that smoking may also lead to depression.
Appearing in the journal PLOS ONE, the research carried out by lead author Prof Hagai Levine and team found that tobacco consumption negatively impacted mental health.
The new study included data from two cross-sectional studies that gathered information from two Serbian universities: the University of Belgrade and the University of Pristina. The former has around 90,000 students, and the latter has around 8,000.
Of this total, 2,138 students enrolled in the study which found that having a higher BDI (Beck Depression Inventory) was associated with smoking and that those students who smoked were two to three times more likely to contract clinical depression than those who had never smoked.
While it’s not proven that smoking leads to depression, the study shows there is a strong link between the two.
A helping hand
Many of us can be clumsy in the kitchen and this temperament isn’t very helpful around sharp objects like graters and knives. All it takes is one slip when chopping vegetables to leave you with a diced finger or worse. The danger of cutting yourself only increases as you get older so it’s worthwhile investing in a pair of cut resistant gloves. If you’re making complex dishes like fish or chopping hard foods, these ingenious mittens will come in handy. It’s impossible to cut yourself while wearing them and they are completely safe in a food environment. Your dexterity isn’t limited when dicing and given how comfortable they are, you’ll feel much more relaxed as you prepare some of your signature dishes. When you’re finished using them, simply pop the gloves in the washing machine and they’ll be back in use in no time. Bon appetite!
