Contrary to common belief, mitochondrial genes seem to matter for how well individuals survive and reproduce. These new results are reported by researchers at Uppsala University, Sweden, who studied the genes of a common beetle species.
Mitochondria are vital power plants of cells. They carry their own genes, which are inherited only through females, and these genes vary greatly between individuals. In the latest issue of the prestigious scientific journal Ecology Letters, researchers from Uppsala University show for the first time that differences in the mitochondrial genes that individuals carry actually affect how well they survive and reproduce.
It took the researchers two years to conduct the experiments, where they followed 180 populations of the seed beetle Callosobruchus maculatus for more than 10 generations. The results are based on gene sequence data from more than 2000 individuals.
Health & Wellness
Email ping pong, where messages are responded to immediately by both sides until a long thread builds up, are particularly despised by many of those involved, the study found
- Worst sin is 'ping pong' messaging where emails are replied to rapidly
- Other faults include emailing out of hours and ignoring emails completely
- Scientists discovered that requesting 'read receipts' and automated replies could create stress for both the sender and their colleagues
And according to psychologists, bad email etiquette is more than just a workplace irritation. They say it can damage our mental health - as well as our colleagues'.
A team from Kingston Business School analysed 28 email accounts to see which messages raised workers' stress levels. They identified seven habits, or 'deadly email sins', that tend to cause negative or harmful feelings.
Getting back to someone within seconds or replying to an email out of office hours made recipients feel that they were not as dedicated to their job as the sender still firing off work emails late at night.
© TFoxFoto/Shutterstock
An Angus calf on grazing lands.
An Angus calf on grazing lands.
But not any old cow urine will do, according to the followers of the hardline Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sect - only the urine collected from a female virgin cow will suffice, and it's best when collected before dawn.
"Cow urine offers a cure for around 70 to 80 incurable diseases like diabetes," Om Prakash, of the RSS Cow Protection Department, told Reuters. "All are curable by cow urine."
Cow urine soda?
Though Westerners may find the practice surprising - if not outright disgusting - the therapeutic use of cow urine has a long history in India, particularly in Ayurvedic medicine, an ancient health care tradition that has been practiced in India for at least 5,000 years.
For people who would rather not drink their cow urine straight, the RSS has developed a cow-urine-based soft drink called Gomutra Ark. The drink is promoted as a "healthy" alternative to Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other soft drinks, which are seen as part of a wider problem resulting from corrupt Western influences.
"We refer to gau ark (cow urine) as gau jal (cow water), as it has immense potential to cure various diseases," Prakash told The Telegraph. "We have developed a soft-drink formula with gau jal as the base."
"This is not a study about the association between cannabis and psychosis, but about the association between specific patterns of cannabis use . . . and an earlier onset of psychotic disorders," Dr. Marta Di Forti, who led the research at the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College, said in an email.
The diagnosis of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) has been seen as a side effect to Gardasil by the Danish health authorities.
According to Danish health care authorities they received 468 reports about 1022 possible side effects to Gardasil during the period 2009-2012. At that point, 53 cases were classified as "serious" out of which 24 were classified "possible" and 29 "less possible".
From the period of January 1, 2009 through August 1, 2013, 1,392,101 vaccine doses of Gardasil were sold in Denmark. Since Gardasil comes in a three dose schedule, approximately 460,000 young Danish girls Denmark may have had the HPV vaccine. During this period was reported 41 suspected serious adverse effects considered as "possible" due to Gardasil.
The latest report from September 26. 2013 describes an increasing number of reported side effects - 281 reports including 1528 side effects, 80 classified "serious", 17 "possible", 29 "less possible" and the last 34 not possible to assess primarily due to missing a diagnosis or too little information.
© Alfred Hermida
Caffeine enhances consolidation of long-term memories.
Caffeine enhances consolidation of long-term memories.
But previous studies generally gave caffeine to people before they began learning.
A new study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, gave caffeine to participants after a session of learning.
They found that it boosted a deeper level of long-term memory (Borota et al., 2014).
One of the study's authors, Michael Yassa, explained that the problem with giving caffeine to people before the learning session is that...
"...if there is an enhancement, it's not clear if it's due to caffeine's effects on attention, vigilance, focus or other factors. By administering caffeine after the experiment, we rule out all of these effects and make sure that if there is an enhancement, it's due to memory and nothing else,"
To understand why chronic exposure to light at night is so bad, we need to consider human evolution. Prior to the end of the stone age, humans were exposed to two different kinds of natural light responsible for regulating circadian rhythmicity. During the day we had the sun, while at night we had the moon and the stars, and perhaps the light from campfires. The binary day/night pattern was unrelenting, and our biological programming followed suit.
Comment: To be consistent it would also help to turn off any smartphone and wireless routers, as wireless radiation is interpreted by our bodies, as light.
See also:
Mobile phone radiation wrecks your sleep
Good Old Melatonin - Making News Again
© Shutterstock
So what do you do? The second step to racking more zzz's is to perfect your sleep hygiene. That means developing a regular sleep schedule, using your bed only for sleep and intimacy, and ditching electronics and caffeine well before bedtime. Here's a sleep hygiene guide to get you started. But that second step is for the daylight hours. The first step is to get to sleep now - pronto - so you can grab at least a couple hours before the birds start chirping.
The tips below might help you sleep easier. Here's the advice of Eric Olson, co-director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minn., and Harneet Walia, a doctor in the Cleveland Clinic's Sleep Disorders Center:
© KHOU Houston Channel 11/Family photoU
Odessa Reed watched her son die in a matter of days from an illness that started with flu-like symptoms
Odessa Reed watched her son die in a matter of days from an illness that started with flu-like symptoms
Health department representatives tell CultureMap that no diagnosis has been made for an unknown illness that begins with symptoms resembling the flu. In a matter of weeks or even days, however, victims develop serious complications including organ failure.
So far all patients have tested negative for influenza, although health professionals are awaiting further lab results.
© permaculturenews.org
For more than two decades, Monsanto and Big Food have poisoned and profited with impunity, thanks to the FDA's reckless 1992 dictate that pesticide-drenched (Roundup-resistant) or insecticide-impregnated (Bt-spliced) crops and foods are "safe and substantially equivalent" to non-GE foods. Now, the Biotech Bullies and Junk Food Giants are under siege by a well-informed and passionate grassroots food movement that is determined to drastically reduce or eliminate the market share of genetically engineered and chemically-intensive foods and crops.
Comment: How Marijuana May Drive the Brain into Psychosis