I am late to this, but recently, George H.W. Bush reminded me why I was so proud--and remain so proud--to cast my very first presidential vote for him in 1992:

Former US President George H W Bush has shaved his head to show support for a boy who has leukaemia.

A Secret Service agent in his security detail has a two-year-old son who is losing his hair as a side-effect of treatment for the cancer.

The 89-year-old Republican lost his greying locks earlier this week at his coastal home in the state of Maine, said a spokesman on Wednesday.

Mr Bush acted after he saw other agents in his detail had shaved their heads.

A Bush spokesman identified the toddler only as Patrick.

Mr Bush and his wife, Barbara, lost their second child, four-year-old Robin, to leukaemia almost 60 years ago.

Want to live forever? Drink coffee:

For hundreds of years, coffee has been one of the two or three most popular beverages on earth. But it’s only recently that scientists are figuring out that the drink has notable health benefits. In one large-scale epidemiological study from last year, researchers primarily at the National Cancer Institute parsed health information from more than 400,000 volunteers, ages 50 to 71, who were free of major diseases at the study’s start in 1995. By 2008, more than 50,000 of the participants had died. But men who reported drinking two or three cups of coffee a day were 10 percent less likely to have died than those who didn’t drink coffee, while women drinking the same amount had 13 percent less risk of dying during the study. It’s not clear exactly what coffee had to do with their longevity, but the correlation is striking.

Other recent studies have linked moderate coffee drinking — the equivalent of three or four 5-ounce cups of coffee a day or a single venti-size Starbucks — with more specific advantages: a reduction in the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, basal cell carcinoma (the most common skin cancer), prostate cancer, oral cancer and breast cancer recurrence.

Perhaps most consequential, animal experiments show that caffeine may reshape the biochemical environment inside our brains in ways that could stave off dementia. In a 2012 experiment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, mice were briefly starved of oxygen, causing them to lose the ability to form memories. Half of the mice received a dose of caffeine that was the equivalent of several cups of coffee. After they were reoxygenated, the caffeinated mice regained their ability to form new memories 33 percent faster than the uncaffeinated. Close examination of the animals’ brain tissue showed that the caffeine disrupted the action of adenosine, a substance inside cells that usually provides energy, but can become destructive if it leaks out when the cells are injured or under stress. The escaped adenosine can jump-start a biochemical cascade leading to inflammation, which can disrupt the function of neurons, and potentially contribute to neurodegeneration or, in other words, dementia.

Read the whole thing. I am guessing that this means tea also does a body good.