Sitting for too long can kill you

Sitting in your desk chair or sitting while watching TV could be killing you. The good news is there are simple steps you can take to get moving.

According to the Physical Living website the average person sits for 9.3 hours a day.

A person who sits to watch to TV for three hours a day is 64 percent more likely to die from heart disease than a person who doesn’t.

The risk of heart disease increases by 11 percent for each additional hour.

Sitting for long periods causes muscles to tighten which makes injury more likely.

Scientists have created porn for pandas in an attempt to boost the animal’s sex drive

Chuang Chuang the panda has been spending his days in front of a big-screen television watching panda porn.

Authorities at the Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand hope the images will encourage him to mate with his partner, Lin Hui, and serve as an instructional lesson in how to do it right.

So far, it’s been a tough sell, the zoo’s chief veterinarian, Kanika Limtrakul, said Tuesday.

“Chuang Chuang seems indifferent to the videos; he has no reaction to what he’s seeing on TV,” Kanika said. “But we’re continuing to show him videos and hoping they will leave an impression.”

Pandas are threatened by loss of habitat, poaching and a low reproduction rate. Females in the wild normally have a cub once every two to three years.

There are as few as 1,600 giant pandas in the mountain forests of central China, according to the zoo. An additional 120 are in Chinese breeding facilities and zoos, and about 20 live in zoos outside China.

Zoo officials say Chuang Chuang will be reunited with his partner in about another week. The two pandas have been kept separate since late last year as part of efforts to spark some romance between them.

Chuang Chuang recently was put on a strict diet because zoo officials said he was too heavy to mate. The diet trimmed him down from 331 pounds to 313 pounds.

Thailand rented 6-year-old Chuang Chuang and 5-year-old Lin Hui from China for $250,000 in October 2003 for 10 years. They are expected to generate millions of dollars in revenue from Thai and foreign tourists.

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Drinking alcohol helps certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better.

The common view that drinking is bad for learning and memory isn’t wrong, says neurobiologist Hitoshi Morikawa, but it highlights only one side of what ethanol consumption does to the brain.

“Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we’re talking about conscious memory,” says Morikawa, whose results were published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. “Alcohol diminishes our ability to hold on to pieces of information like your colleague’s name, or the definition of a word, or where you parked your car this morning. But our subconscious is learning and remembering too, and alcohol may actually increase our capacity to learn, or ‘conditionability,’ at that level.”

When we drink alcohol (or shoot up heroin, or snort cocaine, or take methamphetamines), our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn’t stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.

In an important sense, says Morikawa, alcoholics aren’t addicted to the experience of pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol. They’re addicted to the constellation of environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.

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From the years 2004 to 2011, wearing headphones has caused 81 pedestrian deaths.

Serious injuries to pedestrians listening to headphones have more than tripled in six years, according to new research from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. In many cases, the cars or trains are sounding horns that the pedestrians cannot hear, leading to fatalities in nearly three-quarters of cases.

Researchers reviewed 116 accident cases from 2004 to 2011 in which injured pedestrians were documented to be using headphones. Seventy percent of the 116 accidents resulted in death to the pedestrian. More than two-thirds of victims were male (68 percent) and under the age of 30 (67 percent). More than half of the moving vehicles involved in the accidents were trains (55 percent), and nearly a third (29 percent) of the vehicles reported sounding some type of warning horn prior to the crash. The increased incidence of accidents over the years closely corresponds to documented rising popularity of auditory technologies with headphones.

Dr. Lichenstein says the study was initiated after reviewing a tragic pediatric death where a local teen died crossing railroad tracks. The teen was noted to be wearing headphones and did not avoid the oncoming train despite auditory alarms. Further review revealed other cases not only in Maryland but in other states too. “As a pediatric emergency physician and someone interested in safety and prevention I saw this as an opportunity to — at minimum — alert parents of teens and young adults of the potential risk of wearing headphones where moving vehicles are present,” he says.

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A Japanese scientist created a ringtone that makes a woman’s boobs bigger.

Gone are the days of silicon implantations. Now with the advancement of the technology girls have a better option to enlarge their breasts. Recently Dr Hideto Tomabechi of Japan invented a “rock melon” ring-tone by which women’s breasts will enlarge if they are exposed to that sound. The media reports that the ring tone sounds like a baby crying for a long time.

The advantage of this ring-tone is there will not be any scars or surgery involved. The women can look voluptuous and increase the size of their breasts to 3 centimeters just by hearing the ring-tone 20 times a day over a period of 10 days. Dr Hideto Tomabechi said that he made this ring-tone to prove that the so-called “functional” sounds can affect a woman’s neurochemistry and physiology. However, the doctor did not provide any demonstration of the whole invention nor he gave any information or methodology for testing the ring-tone.

The sources say that “rock melon” is available on-line as well and women from all over the world are scrambling on web to download the ring-tone. However, the doctor said that the ring-tone that is leaked on-line is only a demo-version of the actual ring-tone. The doctor did not cite any reason how the ring-tone would work on women. It seems that there can be some hormonal changes in women after she listens to that specific ring-tone. The doctor has released a video where he stated that there is a “muscular message” which shows that the fat stored in a woman’s belly and butt move towards her breast. This can be an added advantage for a woman as in this way her body can be toned down as well.

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Video games can boost self esteem, reduce stress and improve your eyesight

Video games improve self esteem.

It always feels good to crush your opponent in Madden, which naturally makes you feel better about yourself. But did you know there have been games designed for the specific purpose of improving your self esteem? McGill University researchers focused on encouraging positive thoughts and positive attitudes in an effort to remove negative thought patterns. Of course, developing self-esteem is a bit more complex than just playing a video game, but it provides a good start for patterning behavior.

They reduce stress.

Not only do video games serve as a distraction, but they can fight anger. Researchers at Texas A&M University found that playing violent video games, such as Call of Duty 2, gave players an outlet in which to take out their aggression, contradicting the numerous studies that have indicated the opposite. Thinking of going postal? Play Playstation instead.

They improve your eyesight.

Forget LASIK eye surgery — you can spend $60 on a video game and experience improvement in your vision. According to researchers at the University of Rochester, people who played action video games for a month were able to identify letters presented in clutter 20% better than before. Incredibly, results were shown after just 30 hours of play. When you play action games, your vision is tested to its limit, and the brain adjusts accordingly. The human body is pretty neat.

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Sitting close to the TV will not hurt your eyes

Sitting too close to the TV will not damage your vision, contrary to popular belief.

So why do parents the world over still say this to their kids?  Surprisingly, there was actually a very brief period of time where sitting close to the TV could damage your eyes, assuming you owned a General Electric TV in the 1960s.  Specifically, in 1967, General Electric informed the public that many of their color televisions were emitting excessive x-rays due to a “factory error”.  GE fixed this problem by putting a leaded glass shield around the tubes.

Health officials at the time estimated that the amount of radiation being given off by these defective TVs was about 10 to 100,000 times higher than the rate considered acceptable.  They recommended, if you owned one of these TVs, not to sit too close.  As long as you were a few feet away and didn’t watch TV for more than an hour at a time or so at this close range, you were problem fine.  General Electric of course recalled all these TV’s and fixed the problem, so the issue went away.

However, moms the world over have every since felt it was bad for their kids to sit too close to the TV, even though that is no longer the case at all.  At worst sitting excessively close to the TV these days will just give you a headache and possible eyestrain, but for most people probably not even that, and even for those it does happen to, neither of those are in any way permanently damaging.  Both more or less fix themselves shortly after you stop sitting so close to the TV.

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Studies show that gossip can have social and psychological benefits

For centuries, gossip has been dismissed as salacious, idle chatter that can damage reputations and erode trust. But a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests rumor-mongering can have positive outcomes such as helping us police bad behavior, prevent exploitation and lower stress.

The study also found that gossip can be therapeutic. Volunteers’ heart rates increased when they witnessed someone behaving badly, but this increase was tempered when they were able to pass on the information to alert others.

So strong is the urge to warn others about unsavory characters that participants in the UC Berkeley study sacrificed money to send a “gossip note” to warn those about to play against cheaters in economic trust games. Overall, the findings indicate that people need not feel bad about revealing the vices of others, especially if it helps save someone from exploitation, the researchers said.

“We shouldn’t feel guilty for gossiping if the gossip helps prevent others from being taken advantage of,” said Matthew Feinberg, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and lead author of the paper.

300 participants from around the country were recruited via Craigslist to play several rounds of the economic trust game online. They played using raffle tickets that would be entered in a drawing for a $50 cash prize —an extra incentive to hold on to as many raffle tickets as possible.

Some players were told that the observers during a break could pass a gossip note to players in the next round to alert them to individuals not playing fairly. The threat of being the subject of negative gossip spurred virtually all the players to act more generously, especially those who had scored low on an altruism questionnaire taken prior to the game.

Together, the results from all four experiments show that “when we observe someone behave in an immoral way, we get frustrated,” Willer said. “But being able to communicate this information to others who could be helped makes us feel better.”

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It’s possible to get drunk off of water and it can kill you.

Water intoxication can occur in a variety of different clinical settings but is generally not well recognised in the medical literature. The condition may go unrecognised in the early stages when the patient may have symptoms of confusion, disorientation, nausea, and vomiting, but also changes in mental state and psychotic symptoms. Early detection is crucial to prevent severe hyponatraemia, which can lead to seizures, coma, and death.

Water intoxication provokes disturbances in electrolyte balance, resulting in a rapid decrease in serum sodium concentration and eventual death. The development of acute dilutional hyponatraemia causes neurological symptoms because of the movement of water into the brain cells, in response to the fall in extracellular osmolality. Symptoms can become apparent when the serum sodium falls below 120 mmol/litre, but are usually associated with concentrations below 110 mmol/litre. Severe symptoms occur with very low sodium concentrations of 90–105 mmol/litre. As the sodium concentration falls, the symptoms progress from confusion to drowsiness and eventually coma.

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