02.18.10
Posted in health, science at 12:11 pm by site admin
Check out this article about extreme breath holding.
A Swiss freediver held his breath underwater for 19 minutes and 21 seconds, according to news reports this week. The gasp-inducing feat beat the previous world record by 19 seconds, and blew away the record of 17 minutes and four seconds that magician David Blaine set on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in 2008.
Extreme breath holders rely on a combination of techniques and training. They train their body to slow down the heart and circulatory system. In comparison to traditional methods, this new wave of breath holders leverage modern technology and train in hyperbaric chambers.
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01.13.10
Posted in Evolution, health at 8:52 pm by site admin
Check out this article discussing prions and the fact that they do mutate and evolve like viruses. Prions are degenerate proteins responsible for diseases such as “mad cow disease”, technically termed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD).
In the classic sense, prions, which are misfolded versions of the brain protein PrP, cannot mutate because they do not contain DNA or RNA. They can, however, give rise to variants with different properties, possibly due to differences in the folding, or shape, of the proteins. In the study, published December 31 in Science Express, researchers estimated the rate at which prion mutants can appear in cultured human nerve cells. In addition, the study suggests that once variants appear, they persist at low levels, giving rise to a heterogeneous prion population.
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01.06.10
Posted in health, society at 12:11 am by site admin
A friend sent me this article titled Women Who Don’t Live Alone Add More Weight. Bottom line is that if your a women in a relationship, chances are you have gained at least 4lbs. If you have a baby, the number goes up..
After adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20 pounds if she had a baby and a partner, 15 if she had a partner but no baby, and only 11 pounds if she was childless with no partner. The number of women with a baby but no partner was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions.
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12.25.09
Posted in health at 9:27 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how stress levels in a mother can cause stress-induced sex selection in children.
A recently published study, however, suggests this ain’t necessarily so. According to Ralph Catalano of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues, writing in the American Journal of Human Biology, stress-induced sex selection can take place long after conception and implantation.
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11.30.09
Posted in health at 1:11 pm by site admin
This article on USA Today talks about how routing cancer screenings do more harm then good. Sometimes its not that simple to know what is going on with the body.
There’s growing evidence that cancer screenings aren’t always helpful — and can sometimes be harmful, say Lisa Schwartz and Steve Woloshin of the Veterans Affairs Outcomes Group in White River Junction, Vt.
•Last year, the task force said men over age 75 shouldn’t be screened for prostate cancer, noting that men this age are more likely to die of something else before a prostate tumor could harm them. In March, two long-running and highly anticipated studies found that prostate cancer screening saves few, if any, lives but may hurt countless men by leading them to undergo therapies that can cause impotence, incontinence and even death.
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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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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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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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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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11.12.07
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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10.02.07
Posted in health at 12:46 pm by site admin
Check out this article discussing how chocolate helps with chronic fatigue.
“Also high polyphenols appear to improve levels of serotonin in the brain, which has been linked with chronic fatigue syndrome and that may be a mechanism.”
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09.26.07
Posted in health, society at 10:33 am by site admin
Check out this article @ Scientific American about having a son shortens a mother’s life. Reasons include: 1. Boy’s put a greater strain on their mother’s because they have a heavier birth weight. 2. Testosterone impacts the mother. 3. Son’s are usually tougher on their mothers, and also their siblings.
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