The ability to manage money is essential for independent functioning but highly sensitive to cognitive decline. Managing money involves more than deploying skills rationally; it is influenced by a range of emotional and psychosocial factors. There is relatively little knowledge about how older adults, families and care professionals working with older people navigate and experience potential challenges of declining mental capacity to manage money. This article draws on a UK-based study involving 13 older people and/or family members and 28 social sector professionals, and their experiences of supporting older people with cognitive decline to manage money, triangulated with public information resources from major national organisations across the health, care, consumer and charity sectors. It focuses on the emotive and personal nature of cognitive decline and money management. Declining mental capacity to manage money can strike at the core of people’s sense of who they are, leading to strong tensions and difficulties in discussing support. Support to manage money is often framed in discussions as ‘there if we need it’; this can be reassuring for people, but may be challenged if there are subsequent disagreements and changes in perspectives about the detail and timing of support. These nuances are not well reflected in public information resources, which largely emphasise administrative procedure. Financial organisations may lack empathy that declining mental capacity to manage money is extremely challenging. The article highlights a greater need for recognition of the emotional and psychosocial complexities presented by declining mental capacity to manage money in later life.

The popularity of keeping domesticated cats (Felis catus) indoor-only or outdoor-indoor varies according to geographical location, and both have risks and benefits. Walking cats (e.g. on leashes) may enable mitigation of roaming risks while providing outdoor access, but the practice of walking cats appears relatively uncommon and is yet to be examined in the literature. Semi-structured online interviews (21 participants across seven countries) were conducted to explore cat walking perceptions and experiences in owners who currently practise it. Interview recordings were transcribed and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Five main themes were generated: (1) Benefits of walking; (2) Challenges around walking; (3) Safety for walking; (4) Cat individuality and walking; and (5) Attitudes about walking across geographic contexts. Themes highlighted that participants perceived benefits of walking for both cat and owner but faced challenges largely due to dogs and their owners in addition to judgment from others in the community. The main priorities of walking were seen to be ensuring safety and attending to the individual needs of each cat. Reactions to cat walking appeared to vary according to local norms and attitudes about cats and owner-cat relationships. The subjective nature of both the concept and practice of cat walking was also emphasised. These findings provide an initial base for what the experience of walking cats can be like and highlight that further research to directly investigate the welfare impacts of walking on cats and their owners is now needed.

Physical inactivity is a leading cause globally of noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes. Here, we present the results from a 4-week-long experimental test of a nudge designed to promote physical activity among 206 seniors in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates—a population with one of the highest rates of physical inactivity in the world. We find that the “Forever Fit” nudge—a booklet containing a simple exercise program and information about the health benefits of physical activity—has a large positive effect on 93 previously inactive seniors. The nudge increases the time previously inactive participants spend being physically active from about 5 to about 15 minutes per day.

Non-autonomous self-similar sets are a family of compact sets which are, in some sense, highly homogeneous in space but highly inhomogeneous in scale. The main purpose of this paper is to clarify various regularity properties and separation conditions relevant for the fine local scaling properties of these sets. A simple application of our results is a precise formula for the Assouad dimension of non-autonomous self-similar sets in $\mathbb{R}^d$ satisfying a certain “bounded neighbourhood” condition, which generalises earlier work of Li–Li–Miao–Xi and Olson–Robinson–Sharples. We also see that the bounded neighbourhood assumption is, in few different senses, as general as possible.