Let's see if we know the whole world in six steps It's something you've probably heard about on a birthday party somewhere. That we are actually connected with every [...]
Several months back, my post Cancer, Well-Done examined the ways in which deep-frying and charcoal-grilling introduces cancerous free-radicals into the foods being co [...]
Blight shows hazards of relying on one crop The Irish Famine (or Great Potato Famine if you live outside the Emerald Isle) killed one million people and forced another [...]
Why you eat sweets, Mediterranean diets or convenience food.
You can probably guess that organized people are more likely to eat healthy and have a low BMI score. But did you also know that people who are less open to experiences more often like sweets? These findings, published in the new Health Psychology, may sound pretty random, which some of them may actually be, but they're interesting food for thought.
A group of researchers looked at 1091 70-year olds that already participated in a study in 1936. They asked them about their eating habits, tested their personality with the well known five factor model and measured their BMI to find some interesting associations.
With a computer program they categorized the reported eating habits into four different diets: the Mediterranean, convenience or healt
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We have smart genes--the rest is up to us
A lot of people study intelligence, or at least take it for granted. We speak, listen (sometimesmore on that in a bit), form social groups that other animals dont. Pretty smart, eh? But humans also do some colossally dumb thingsengage in unnecessary stereotyping, stick our tongues to a frozen pole, or trigger a worldwide financial crisis.
So, while its valuable to study human intelligence, it might be just as valuable to study human stupidity. There may be more value than meets the eye.
Gerald Crabtree, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, states that intelligent human behavior requires between 2,000 and 5,000 genes to work together. A mutation or other fault in any of these genes, and some kind of intellectual deficiency results. Before the creation o
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Do geese nest in trees?
On Imgur there was a list of comments on the picture above and its tagline saying "Baby Geese Leave the Nest for the First Time." First there was Stevithegreat, who said that the animals aren't geese but wood ducks that aren't flying but falling. "It's how they leave the nest." Goodloveall partly agreed: "Those arent fucking geese. Geese build nests on the ground." And some more angry words about people not doing research before posting something.
According to Goodloveall (and most other commenters) the babies aren't wood ducks but goldeneye ducks, known to nest in the cavities of large trees, about 1 to 18 meters above the ground. As the young leave the nest one or two days after hatching, and only can fly when they're 5 to 6 weeks old, it seems that these baby ducks are indeed
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Both male and female psychotherapists often cry during sessions.
I guess you would be pretty surprised if you went to a psychotherapist and he or she started crying. But it sounds weirder than it actually is. In a survey among 684 American psychologists and trainees it turned out that most of them shed tears during therapy. And this wasn't a women's issue.
There haven't been many studies into this subject. That's why Amy Blume-Marcovici and her colleagues held an online survey exploring therapist's experience with and attitude towards this phenomenon. It appears to be something that isn't related to the usual crying patterns we see in society.
72 percent of the questioned therapists reported having cried in therapy. And it weren't the subject's sex, personality traits or general feelings of empathy tha
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Scientist has discovered what animal might be responsibe for these mysterious rings.
The Namib, a coastal desert in southern Africa, is known for its "fairy circles": rings of perennial vegetation with a barren center that occur in regular patterns. For long it has been a mystery what caused the fairy circles to pop up, but new research suggests that a species of sand termite (Psammotermes) might be responsible.
Source: Live Science
Photo: N. Juergens
Juergens, N. (2013). The Biological Underpinnings of Namib Desert Fairy Circles Science, 339 (6127), 1618-1621 DOI: 10.1126/science.1222999
circles in africa, faerie rings, desert du na
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By Patrick Meyer
New Orleans Jazz Funerals Celebrate the End of the Struggle
Unlike most port cities in the American South, New Orleans is very Catholic. And with Catholicism come the longstanding and elaborate Old World rituals. And unlike anywhere else in the world, New Orleans has its very own jazz funeral, a communal celebration where grief is danced out of the body and cast off into the air with soaring jazz cadenzas, carnival-worthy costumes, and respect for a time-honored ritual that allows the deceased to be shepherded to their final resting place with great fanfare and joy. A loud and triumphant alternative to Western expectations when it comes to rituals of grief and loss, the jazz funerals genealogical roots are wholly African, using joy and music instead of sadness and silence, to recogn
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By: Laura Ellen Joyce
When the initial furore over the Juarez-inspired Fall/Winter 2010 collection designed by Rodarte in collaboration with MAC cosmetics hit the fashion blogs, I had only recently become aware of the femicides on the Mexican-US borders. Though the situation has been ongoing for more than twenty years, and during that period thousands of women have gone missing, and hundreds more found murdered, there has been scant media attention in the mainstream (UK) media. My first awareness of the situation came from watching Missing Young Woman (Señorita Extraviada), a documentary directed by Lourdes Portillo, which was shown at the Transnational Feminisms conference 2009 at the University of Manchester. What strikes me is that I had to find this information out, in a context which was academic, nic
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By: Elke Weesjes, Ph.D and Lori Peek, Ph.D
In 1987, Irwin Redlener, and singer/songwriter, Paul Simon, founded Children's Health Fund (CHF) with the goal of providing comprehensive health care to homeless and medically underserved children. Today, under the leadership of Dr. Redlener, Mr. Simon, and Executive Director, Karen Redlener, CHF sustains a national network of 25 programs serving some of Americas most impoverished communities.
This post, the first of a two-part series on CHF, features Alan Shapiro, MD. He is Senior Medical Director of the New York Childrens Health Project and of the South Bronx Health Center and Center for Child Health and Resiliency, both affiliated with CHF and Montefiore Medical Center. Recently, Dr. Shapiro talked to us about the history of Children's Health Fund, his wo
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This article about hurricane Sandy and the problems of evacuation, was first published in the January issue of the United Academics Magazine. Parts of this publication's content have now been made available for those who don't have an Ipad and/or UA magazine subscription. I hope that by republishing this story on my blog, people are reminded of the horrendous events of October 2012. For many of us, life has gone back to normal, but in the areas hit hardest, like the Rockaways, life is a struggle. Many displaced Sandy survivors are still living in hotel rooms. Their future is uncertain and they and many other victims still need your help.
SURVIVING SANDY: STAYING PUT IN FAR ROCKAWAY| By Elke Weesjes PhD and Lori Peek PhD
Hurricane Sandy churned across the Caribbean and up the eastern seaboard of the U.S
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We are all familiar with photographs of death. From Margaret Bourke-White's coverage of Nazi concentration camps and Eddie Adam's world famous image of General Loan shooting a Viet Cong soldier in the head, to the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year, depicting the bodies of two children carried by their uncles to a mosque for their funeral in Gaza City. Photography immortalizes places, people and events. It celebrates life and commemorates death.
Recording death is nothing new. Death and photography have been historically intertwined from as early as the mid-19th century when the daguerreotype process was invented by the French artist and physicist Louis Daguerre (1787-1851). In this process, images fixed themselves not to paper but to silver-coated copper and the copper was then covered by glass. Onl
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