CNN health | This is what happens to your body over months in isolation

(CNN) – Since the pandemic officially began in March, we’ve been told staying home is the best way to avoid catching Covid-19. And it is. But life in confinement can cause physical ailments on its own.

Being homebound for so long contorts the body, weakens the heart and lungs and even impairs brain function. The effects of life in isolation may stay with us beyond the pandemic’s end (whenever that may be).

This is what half a year of isolation, staying home and staying sedentary can do to your body.  —more—

CNN | Architect’s innovative shipping container homes could help solve Puerto Rico’s housing crisis

KONTi’s vision is to turn shipping containers into safe and affordable homes.

(CNN) – Puerto Rican architect Carla Gautier Castro stands overlooking the remains of a home after a string of earthquakes hammered the town of Yauco, on the southwest of the island.

It’s a painful scene she has seen again and again. It is also the reason she now dedicates her life to ensuring everyone on the island has a safe dwelling.

The pillars of this concrete house collapsed, crushing three vehicles underneath. Furniture and personal belongings are strewn around, unreachable, unsalvageable.

“I’m traumatized,” homeowner Luz María Morales Vargas tells Gautier Castro. “We’ve lived here for 27 years.”  —more—

CNN BUSINESS | Home sales reach a 14-year high in August, with prices hitting a new record

Home sales surged to a 14-year high in August as record low interest rates brought homebuyers out in droves and pushed prices to a new record high.

Existing home sales — which includes sales of single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops — were up 2.4% in August from July, to a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 6 million transactions, according to the National Association of Realtors. That was a 10.5% increase from the year before and the highest level since December 2006.  —more—

CNN BUSINESS | Commercial real estate flounders as housing market booms

New York (CNN Business) – The housing market is red hot thanks to record-low mortgage rates and consumers looking to flee cities for the suburbs. But offices, shopping malls and other commercial real estate properties have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.

The rise of Zoom (ZM), Slack (WORK) and other productivity tools has made it easier for people to set up home offices and still get their jobs done. Meanwhile, Amazon (AMZN) and other digital retailers are flourishing amid the Covid-19 pandemic as the shift from bricks to clicks has accelerated.

“There will likely be less demand for commercial real estate due to the rising popularity of online shopping and working from home,” said Ivy Investments global economist Derek Hamilton in an e-mail.  —more—

CNN BUSINESS | Fed pledges to keep interest rates near zero for years

New York (CNN Business) – The Federal Reserve committed Wednesday to do more to help the US economic recovery, promising more asset purchases and lower interest rates for even longer than it previously expected.

The Federal funds rate remained unchanged at zero to a quarter percentage point, and will stay there until America’s labor market has recovered “consistent with the Committee’s assessments of maximum employment” and the inflation rate has risen to 2%, and is on track to exceed that level for some time.

Given the country is still down 11.5 million jobs since February and the consumer price inflation rate over the past 12 months stood at 1.3% last month, this seems like a long way off.  —more—

CNN | Officers covered head of Black man and held him to the ground before he stopped breathing, bodycam video shows

(CNN) – Newly released police video of the March death of a Black man in Rochester, New York, shows officers covering his head and holding him on the ground before he stopped breathing.

Daniel Prude was having a mental health episode on March 23 when his brother Joe Prude called the Rochester Police Department for help, the family said at a press conference Wednesday. Prude stopped breathing after police knelt on him while he was handcuffed, according to video.

When he was brought to the hospital 15 minutes later, he was brain dead, Joe Prude said.  —more—

CNN BUSINESS | First toilet paper, then yeast. Now laptops are hard to find

New York (CNN Business) – In March, as the country transitioned to online learning almost overnight because of the pandemic, many schools and families did their best to make do with the tools they had.

The situation revealed deep disparities in access to at-home technology, and many school districts hoped to rectify the situation when they began hybrid or online schooling come fall.

“When we found out we would be doing remote learning in full, it meant we had to get devices distributed out to students in need,” Lara Hussain, manager of academic technology for Denver Public Schools, told CNN Business. “Timing was critical … No one wants to start where students have no access to devices or the internet.”  —more—

CNN style | Misty Copeland offers a glimpse inside her elegant New York home

Misty Copeland for Architectural Digest’s October issue. Credit: Lelanie Foster

Misty Copeland has become the first ballet dancer to appear on the cover of Architectural Digest in more than three decades after she opened the doors to her Manhattan home.

The 37-year-old, who was named the American Ballet Theater’s principal dancer in 2015 — the first Black woman to hold that role — offered the magazine a rare glimpse inside her Upper West Side apartment as part of its forthcoming October issue.  —more—

CNN health | Lewy body dementia: The life-changing disease that devastated Robin Williams

The late Robin Williams (right) and his wife, Susan Schneider Williams, were in a years-long relationship before marrying in 2011. The comedian had a type of dementia that’s difficult to diagnose.

(CNN) – Alzheimer’s disease and dementia are two diseases that many Americans are all too familiar with, but there is another dementia that plagued the late comedian Robin Williams.

It might be “the most common disease you’ve never heard of,” said Dr. James Galvin, a professor of neurology and director of the Lewy Body Dementia Research Center of Excellence at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.

Williams had Lewy body dementia, which his family learned only after his death. It’s often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease due to its early similarity to those other neurodegenerative diseases.  —more—

CNN | Former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin was never afraid to go to space. But a police stop made him sweat

NASA astronaut Leland D. Melvin wasn’t scared to fly into space.

(CNN) – A police stop could have cost former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin his career in space before he ever got started.

Melvin, who was never afraid launching into space on two Space Shuttle Atlantis missions to help build the International Space Station, never knew what was going to happen when the cops pulled him over.  —more—