06.15.09
Posted in health at 7:39 pm by site admin
Check out this article talking about how napping is good for your health.
Research on napping is constantly showing positive effects. The results suggest that napping can make you more alert, reduce stress and improve cognitive functioning compared to working all day without rest. A mid-afternoon sleep means that productivity can last long into the night. Researchers at NASA showed that a 30-minute power nap increased cognitive functioning by 40%. The volunteers on the tests found that their memory improved as well as experiencing an increase in concentration. Those who didn’t nap would score lower on IQ test than those that did (after a day of work).
There is also a kinda cool concept midway through called caffeine naps.
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Posted in health at 2:28 pm by site admin
Check out this article on breast feeding and good academics.
“The results of our study suggest that the cognitive and health benefits of breastfeeding may lead to important long-run educational benefits for children,” Sabia, a professor of public policy who focuses on health economics, said in a statement.
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03.04.09
Posted in Unfiled at 3:25 pm by site admin
Check out
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10.15.08
Posted in health at 4:38 pm by site admin
This article talks about how drinking shrinks the brain.
They decrease in size by about 2 percent per decade, and the brains of drinkers may shrink more quickly, according to a study published Monday in the Archives of Neurology, a publication of the American Medical Association. Those who drank most saw the most shrinkage. Women’s brains suffered more than men’s, perhaps because women tend to be smaller than men and may metabolize alcohol differently.
However, the study was not able to show what effect this had on cognitive abilitity.
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09.08.08
Posted in Unfiled, health at 11:40 am by site admin
Found a couple articles about aging and longevity.
First, this article proposes that aging is affected by brake and accelerator genes.
It suggests instead that a combination of factors is at play—that in addition to rusting, there are also certain genes that may carry instructions to start the aging process.
Also, this article talks about how polygamy may extend the lives of men.
If female survival is the main explanation for male longevity, then monogamous and polygamous men would live for about the same length of time. Instead, it seems that fathering more kids with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, then, live long because they’re fertile well into their grey years.
Finally, this article talks about how a more active lifestyle can increase your lifespan.
“A sedentary lifestyle increases the propensity to aging-related disease and premature death,” researchers at King’s College London report today in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. “Inactivity may diminish life expectancy not only by predisposing to aging-related diseases but also because it may influence the aging process itself.”
Their findings: the telomeres of subjects who exercised the most (an average of 199 minutes weekly) were longer than those of volunteers who worked out the least (a mere 16 minutes or less a week). The discrepancy was enough, researchers wrote, to suggest that the exercise mavens were on average as much as a decade biologically younger than the slackers.
The scientists speculate that stress, inflammation and oxidative stress (cell damage caused by oxygen exposure) may be responsible for shortened telomeres in physically inactive people. Exercise is among the factors found to help alleviate stress. Previous research has linked regular workouts to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, obesity and osteoporosis.
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08.07.08
Posted in health at 8:03 am by site admin
Check out this article on sexsomnia aka sleepsex.
“Any basic instinct can come out in the context of sleep,” Schenck told LiveScience. “All sorts of things can happen.”
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07.02.08
Posted in health at 11:04 am by site admin
This article talks about how relaxation techniques like yoga, tai chi, etc can change the patterns of gene activity that affect how the body responds to stress.
“It’s not all in your head,” said Dr. Herbert Benson, president emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “What we have found is that when you evoke the relaxation response, the very genes that are turned on or off by stress are turned the other way. The mind can actively turn on and turn off genes. The mind is not separated from the body.”
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06.06.08
Posted in health at 10:29 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing the health problems with prolonged use of flip flops. The gist is that, when walking with flip flops, modify their gait and walking to (1) keep their flip flop on and (2) prevent stubbing their toes.
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05.24.08
Posted in health at 9:20 am by site admin
Check out this article talks about a book titled Blue Zones.
(The term “Blue Zones” takes its name from the ink Belgian demographer Michel Poulain used to circle an area of long-living Sardinians on a map.)
What Buettner found in his seven years of research and travel were common denominators among the vigorous super-elderly - close family relationships, a sense of purpose, healthy eating habits. He distills them into what he calls the Power Nine that readers can use to create their own Blue Zone.
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04.23.08
Posted in Evolution at 1:31 pm by site admin
Check out this article discussing how a mother’s diet affects the sex of her children.
“This research may help to explain why in developed countries, where many young women choose low calorie diets, the proportion of boys is falling,” Mathews said.
The study’s findings, she added, could point to a “natural mechanism” for gender selection.
The link between a rich diet and male children may have an evolutionary explanation.
For most species, the number of offspring a male can father exceeds the number a female can give birth to. But only if conditions are favorable — poor quality male specimens may fail to breed at all, whereas females reproduce more consistently.
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03.31.08
Posted in Evolution at 9:05 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about how guys are kinda clueless reading signals from women. However, its not your typical “she wants me”, but….
Rather than seeing the world through sex-colored glasses, men seemed just to have blurry vision of sorts, overall. For instance, the college guys sometimes mistook sexual advances as pal-like gestures.
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03.06.08
Posted in health at 2:18 pm by site admin
Check out this article about drinking to help forget things.
The age-old belief goes that alcohol helps people drown their sorrows, but in truth the bottle only makes bad memories linger, a Japanese study said Friday.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo concluded that ethanol — an intoxicating agent in alcohol — does not cause memory to decrease, as widely believed, but instead locks it in place.
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03.04.08
Posted in Religion/Philosophy at 10:32 am by site admin
Not sure which way to take this, but interesting read nonetheless.
Moses was High on Drugs
JERUSALEM (AFP) - High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.
Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.
“As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don’t believe, or a legend, which I don’t believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics,” Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.
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02.29.08
Posted in Environment at 10:06 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing how rain and snow may form because of bacteria in the atmosphere.
One might rethink playing with snow or walking in the rain as a new study by scientists from the Louisiana State University revealed that snow and rain might form mostly on bacteria in the clouds.
Scientists have long known that the ice crystals in clouds, which become rain or snow, need to cling to some kind of particle, called ice nucleators, in order to form in temperatures above minus 40 degrees Celsius.
Microbiologist Brent Christner at Louisiana State University sampled snow from Antarctica, France, and the Yukon and found that as much as 85 percent of the nuclei were bacteria, he said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press.
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02.20.08
Posted in Environment at 8:21 pm by site admin
As most people know there is a lunar eclipse tonight. However, its rainy and overcast here, so it looks like its a no-show tonight.
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01.21.08
Posted in health at 2:26 pm by site admin
This article discusses new research suggesting that a component in male semen enhances the propagation of HIV. Also, this article discusses how aggressive behavior triggers dopamine. This article suggests that cooking, and not a carnivorous diet drove the evolution of man.
And you believe cooking with that fire spurred the development of modern humans.
Here’s the way I tend to ask the question: I tend to think of the advent of cooking as having a huge impact on the quality of the diet. In fact, I can’t think of any increase in the quality of diet in the history of life that is bigger. And repeatedly we have evidence in biology of increases in dietary quality affecting bodies. The food was softer, easier to eat, with a higher density of calories—so this led to smaller guts, and, since the food was providing more energy, we see more evidence of energy use by the body. There’s only one time it could have happened on that basis; that is, with the evolution of Homo erectus somewhere between 1.6 [million] and 1.8 million years ago.
Finally, this article suggests that new SIRT1-activating diabetes medication has the potential to improve longevity in humans.
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Posted in health at 1:50 pm by site admin
Check out this article that talks briefly about how napping improves new memory retention.
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12.19.07
Posted in Evolution, health at 3:18 pm by site admin
Found this article talking about how anti-aging drugs do/don’t really work— more specifically, they can’t stop the inevitable..
Preliminary research suggests that mitochondria-rejuvenating drugs are capable, at least in lab animals, of halting these diseases and extending longevity. The research also suggests that, once they’ve reached the end of their traditional lifespans, these animals tend to die quickly and inexplicably, without any indication of disease or systemic breakdown.
If the pattern holds in people, death would not be preceded by months or years of suffering. It would also come without warning, forever catching family and loved ones by surprise.
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11.13.07
Posted in society at 11:17 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about the origins of chocolate. Instead of being sweet candy, it started off as a beer-like beverage. Kinda sounds more like hot cocoa than a sweet snack. I wonder if that means it was bitter too…
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11.12.07
Posted in health at 6:43 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about a man in Arizona who just died from the plague. I’m just surprised that the plague is still around.. and in the US too!
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