Men & Women Do See Things Differently

Credit: Rubylane.com

You've probably shook your head hundreds of times over when it comes to your partner's choice of clothing, shoes and caps. Forgive the clueless fella as research has shown that men and women's brains really do function differently.

While men are more attentive to finer details in moving objects, women are better at differentiating between colours.

So while you may think that pink dress looks lovely, he might not be so conforming.

In the research conducted by City University of New York, the participants were asked to describe the different colours shown to them. All of them had normal 20/20 vision and none were colour blind, a condition which is commonly found in men than in women.

Overall, the men struggled to distinguish between the subtle differences in the shades of yellow, green and blue.  They also required a longer wavelength of colour to see shades like how a woman does. This means that if both sexes look at an orange, the fruit will appear redder to the man than to the woman. Similarly, grass would look yellower to a man and greener to a woman.

One reasonable explanation for this lies with the male hormone of testosterone which may affect how their brain processes and makes sense of the vision from their eyes. “We hypothesise that testosterone plays a major role, somehow leading to different connectivities for males and females,” explained Professor Israel Abramov.

One thing though, men were found to be particularly good at detecting fine detail in moving images. This, researchers said could be an indication of what might have made our forefathers such good hunters. Hence, it also explains why watching football or F1 is a favourite hobby of many guys today.

Note to self: never ever ask a man if these colours look good on you or the home you're repainting.

MALE DNA FOUND IN BRAINS OF WOMEN

If you're a woman who has been pregnant with a male fetus, you may have male DNA permanently in your body, according to a study that found such genetic material in the brains of women.

The study, published in PLoS ONE, is the first description of male microchimerism in the female human brain. Microchimerism is when someone harbors cells that came from a genetically distinct individual. Or, in the immortal words of the Monkees (singing a Neil Diamond penned song), a person can be A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You.

The serious side of this is that scientists working at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center  have linked the phenomenon to autoimmune diseases and cancer, sometimes for better and other times for worse.

Lead author William Chan, who is in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Alberta, conducted the research while working in the lab of J. Lee Nelson, a member of the Center’s Clinical Research Division and a leading international authority on microchimerism.

The scientists believe it is likely that fetal cells frequently cross the human blood-brain barrier and that microchimerism in the brain is relatively common. Until this study, it was not known whether these cells could cross the barrier in humans.

According to a press release issued by the cancer center:

The researchers examined brain autopsy specimens from 59 women who had died between the ages of 32 and 101. Male microchimerism was detected in 63 percent of subjects, was distributed in multiple brain regions and was potentially persistent throughout the human lifespan; the oldest female in whom male fetal DNA was detected in the brain was 94.

Twenty six of the women had no neurological disease and 33 had Alzheimer’s disease. The brains of women with Alzheimer’s had a somewhat lower prevalence of male microchimerism, which appeared in lower concentrations in regions of the brain most affected by the disease. However, the authors noted that the small number of subjects and largely unknown pregnancy history of the women means a link between Alzheimer’s disease and level of male cells of fetal origin cannot be established.

"Currently, the biological significance of harboring male DNA and male cells in the human brain requires further investigation," Chan was quoted as saying in the release.

Prior research does, however, suggest that women who harbor male DNA might be protected against some types of cancer, such as breast cancer, and autoimmune disease, like rheumatoid arthritis. It may, though, increase the risk of other cancers, such as colon cancer.

Many studies suggest that just having a child affects the future health of the mother, and not just because the kid could drive her crazy or, conversely, help to improve her lot in life. At least mothers now know that their sons might not ever fully leave them, even after they move out of the nest.

(Image: Taylor Schlades)

http://news.discovery.com

Woman Addicted to Mayonnaise Will Use It for Everything. And I Mean Everything!

Philippa Garfield, from London, England, loves mayonnaise so much she will eat it with pretty much anything, and even wash her hair with it.

We’ve featured some pretty weird addictions here on Oddity Central, from the guy addicted to sausages, to the woman who loved drinking her own urine, but Philippa Garfield takes things to a whole other level. While mayo might not be the strangest thing a person can become addicted to, it’s the way she uses it that makes her story really bizarre. Although she loves eating mayo and pours it over anything she eats, and even in her morning coffee, Philippa also uses the fatty condiment as a cheap moisturizer and conditioner for her hair. She also sees it as the perfect alternative to shaving cream.

Photo: Wikimedia

The Diagonal View video doesn’t reveal how Philippa Garfield first got addicted to mayo, but it makes it very clear she likes the stuff a little too much. She apparently eats it with everything, even desserts which I find pretty disgusting. The smell of her hair after a mayonnaise shower isn’t very appealing, either.

http://www.odditycentral.com

Child abuse disrupts brain, may cause depression: study

Children who suffer or witness physical abuse undergo changes to their brain structure that may predispose them to depression and substance abuse later in life, a study said Wednesday.

The finding holds promise for early detection and pre-emptive counselling already in adolescence -- a crucial phase of physical and emotional development and brain maturation, say researchers in the United States.

Using a specialised MRI scanning technique, "we identified microstructural disruption at certain locations of the white matter tracts of adolescents who experienced maltreatment during childhood," researcher Hao Huang told AFP.

White matter tracts or nerve fibres, comparable to computer network cables, connect the grey matter in the brain's different processing regions -- transmitting signals to ensure they "talk" with each other efficiently.

Nineteen adolescents who had suffered physical or sexual abuse before the age of 10 or witnessed domestic violence that lasted six months or longer, took part in the study, as well as a control group of 13 with no abuse history.

Those in the abused group were physically and mentally healthy at the time they were recruited at an average age of 16, and were not abusing alcohol or drugs at the time.

All the teenagers were followed at six-month intervals for up to five years.

"We found that adolescents with maltreatment history who had disrupted white matter tracts during the initial recruitment were more likely to develop depressive and addictive disorders," said Huang of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre's Advanced Imaging Research Centre.

Five of the 19 abuse victims developed depression later, compared to one in the control group, while four became substance abusers compared to one control teenager.

Two from the maltreated group developed both conditions, said the study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

The adolescents exposed to childhood abuse as well as those who later developed depression had significantly lower FA values -- a measure of white matter efficiency.

"We believe that... brain scans might be helpful in identifying youngsters who are at high risk for developing these disorders and target them for early preventive intervention," said Huang.

Earlier studies had observed similar white matter changes in individuals with a history of abuse, but this was the first to find a link to later psychological problems. Huang said the exact mechanism by which the white matter tracts were disrupted was not yet understood and required further investigation.

http://news.yahoo.com

China and the Olympics

Ye Shewin wins a gold medal

China’s Olympic triumphs prove once again the transforming nature of revolutions.

The People’s Republic of China sent its first delegation of athletes to the 1952 Olympic summer games in Helsinki, Finland. Arriving late, they were able to participate in only one sporting event. Due to the imperialists refusing to recognize the Chinese communist government in Beijing, and instead declaring Taiwan the representative of China in the Olympics, the PRC boycotted the summer games for the next 32 years.

It wasn’t until the 1984 games in Los Angeles that the PRC sent its first full delegation of athletes. And 24 years later in 2008, China hosted the XXIX summer games in Beijing, where it won 100 medals — more than any other country, including the U.S.

That was an astonishing achievement for a country that had only recently begun to emerge from semifeudal underdevelopment after a heroic socialist revolution achieved people’s power in 1949. Today China, with 1.3 billion people, has the second-largest economy in the world.

China showed at the 2008 games that it was a world sports power to be reckoned with. It shattered the myth that only teams from rich capitalist countries like the U.S. were invincible. The U.S. could not hide its displeasure with China’s achievements. Most notably, when the Chinese won the gold medal in women’s team gymnastics, beating the reigning world champions from the U.S., the latter accused the Chinese team of being underage because of their small stature. Women gymnasts are required to turn 16 in the same year as the games.

The U.S. was hoping that the Chinese women would be disqualified, but it never happened. Chinese coach Lu Shanzhen stated, “It’s unfair that people keep saying the Chinese are too young to compete. If they think they can tell someone’s age just by looking at them, well, if you look at the foreign athletes, they have so much more muscles than the Chinese. They are so strong. Do you then say that they are doping?” (New York Times, Aug. 13, 2008)

History is repeating itself four years later, at the 2012 XXX Olympic Games in London, where China sent the fifth-largest delegation of athletes. Only Great Britain, the U.S., Australia and Germany sent more. As of day three of the games, China is tied with the U.S. for the most medals won overall, and it has more gold medals than any other country.

The Chinese male gymnasts won their second consecutive team gold medal, with Japan winning the silver and Great Britain the bronze. The U.S. team came in fifth. Both Japan and Great Britain had brutally ruled China with an iron fist in the last century. Before China’s Olympic victories, the biased U.S. gymnastic commentators on NBC stated that the Chinese men were in danger of not winning any kind of medal, due to their “mediocre” qualifying scores (which are required to reach the finals).

The U.S. is once again expressing its anti-China bias by accusing a great Chinese swimmer, Ye Shiwen, of using banned substances. Ye won a gold medal July 30 in the 400-meter individual medley, setting a world record. U.S. coach John Leonard made the accusation in a Guardian interview, saying Ye’s performance was “unbelievable,” “outrageous,” “disturbing” and that she looked like a “superwoman.” Ye replied, “The Chinese team keep very firmly to the anti-doping policies, so there is absolutely no problem.” (July 30)

When it was reported that Ye swam faster over a 50-meter span than U.S. gold medal winner Ryan Lochte, Leonard commented that “a woman does not out-swim the fastest man in the world in the back quarter of a 400m individual medley that is otherwise quite ordinary. It just doesn’t happen.” However, the British Olympic Committee officially stated that Ye was clean. These accusations hark back to the anticommunist, sexist statements made during the 1980s about women athletes from the former German Democratic Republic.

What has infuriated the U.S. and other Western powers most of all is that in just three generations China, as a result of a massive revolutionary upheaval that lasted for decades, has come from being one of the poorest countries in the world, where only the most privileged got any kind of education or training, to a world power in so many areas, including sports.

Credit to : http://www.workers.org

5 Signs Humans Are Still Evolving

When we think of human evolution, our minds wander back to the thousands of years it took natural selection to produce the modern-day man. But are we still changing as a species, even today? New research suggests that, despite modern technology and industrialization, humans continue to evolve. “It is a common misunderstanding that evolution took place a long time ago, and that to understand ourselves we must look back to the hunter-gatherer days of humans,” says Dr. Virpi Lummaa from the University of Sheffield’s department of animal and plant sciences.

But not only are we still evolving, we’re doing so even faster than before. In the last 10,000 years, the pace of our evolution has sped up 100 times, creating more mutations in our genes, and more natural selections from those mutations. Here are some clues that show humans are continuing to evolve.

1. We Drink Milk

Historically, the gene that regulated a human’s ability to digest lactose shut down as they were weaned off of their mother’s breast milk. But when we began domesticating cows, sheep and goats, being able to drink milk became a nutritionally advantageous quality, and people with the genetic mutation that allowed them to digest lactose were better able to propagate their genes. A 2006 study suggests this tolerance for lactose was still developing as early as 3,000 years ago in East Africa. That genetic mutation for digesting milk is now carried by more than 95 percent of Northern European descendants.

2. We’re Losing Our Wisdom Teeth

Our ancestors had much bigger jaws than we do, which helped them chew a tough diet of roots, nuts and leaves. And what meat they ate they tore apart with their teeth, all of which led to worn down chompers that needed replacing. Enter the wisdom teeth: A third set of molars is believed to be the evolutionary answer to accomodate our ancestors’ eating habits. Today, we have utensils to cut our food. Our meals are softer and easier to chew, and our jaws are much smaller as a result, which is why wisdom teeth are often impacted when they come in — there just isn’t room for them. Like the appendix, wisdom teeth have become vestigial organs. One estimate says 35 percent of the population is born without wisdom teeth, and some say they will disappear altogether.

3. We’re Resisting Diseases

In 2007, a group of researchers looking for signs of recent evolution uncovered 1,800 genes that have only become prevalent in humans in the last 40,000 years, many of which are devoted to fighting infectious diseases like malaria. More than a dozen new genetic variants for fighting malaria are spreading rapidly among Africans. Another study found that natural selection has favored city-dwellers. Living in cities has produced a genetic variant that allows us to be more resistant to diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy. “This seems to be an elegant example of evolution in action,” says Dr. Ian Barnes from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway. “It flags up the importance of a very recent aspect of our evolution as a species, the development of cities as a selective force.”

4. Our Brains Are Shrinking

While we may like to believe our big brains make us smarter than the rest of the animal world, our brains have actually been shrinking over the last 30,000 years. The average volume of the human brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cubic centimeters, which is equivalent to a chunk the size of a tennis ball. There are several different conclusions as to why this is: One group of researchers suspects our shrinking brains mean we are in fact getting dumber. Historically, brain size decreased as societies became larger and more complex, suggesting that the safety net of modern society negated the correlation between intelligence and survival. But another, more encouraging theory says our brains are shrinking not because we’re getting dumber, but because smaller brains are more efficient. This theory suggests that, as they shrink, our brains are being rewired to work faster but take up less room. There’s also a theory that smaller brains are an evolutionary advantage because they make us less aggressive beings, allowing us to work together to solve problems, rather than tear each other to shreds.

5. We Have Blue Eyes

Originally, we all had brown eyes. But about 10,000 years ago, someone who lived near the Black Sea developed a genetic mutation that turned brown eyes blue. While the reason blue eyes have persisted remains a bit of a mystery, one theory is that they act as a sort of paternity test. “There is strong evolutionary pressure for a man not to invest his paternal resources in another man’s child,” says the lead author of a study on the development of our baby blues. Because it is virtually impossible for two blue-eyed mates to create a brown-eyed baby, our blue-eyed male ancestors may have sought out blue-eyed mates as a way of ensuring fidelity. This would partially explain why, in a recent study, blue-eyed men rated blue-eyed women as more attractive compared to brown-eyed women, whereas females and brown-eyed men expressed no preference.

Read the full text here: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/128372#ixzz1wpSyavq9

Tired of Feeling Bad? The New Science of Feelings Can Help

Is your emotional style getting you down? Research finds the neural basis of your responses to life-and how you can change them.

If you believe most pop psychology, you probably assume that most of us react to life events in just about the same way—there is a grieving process, a sequence of events when we fall in love, a standard response to being jilted.

But these one-size-fits-all assumptions are not true. In decades of research into the neurobiology of emotion, I’ve seen thousands of people who share similar backgrounds respond in dramatically different ways to the same experience. Why does one person recover quickly from divorce while another remains mired in self-recrimination or despair? Why does one sibling bounce back from a job loss while another feels worthless for years? And why can one father shrug off the botched call of a Little League umpire who called his daughter out while another leaps out of his seat and screams at the ump until his face turns purple? The answer that has emerged from my research is that these differences reflect what I call Emotional Style—a constellation of reactions and coping responses that differ in kind, intensity, and duration. Just as each person has a unique fingerprint and a unique face, each of us has a unique emotional profile.

That may seem as obvious as stating that everyone has a unique personality. But personality is not grounded in identifiable neurological mechanisms; it has not been traced to specific patterns of neural activity in the brain. This is where the theory of Emotional Style breaks new ground: through neuroimaging and other methodologies, I have traced Emotional Style—and, specifically, the six components that make it up—to patterns of activity throughout the brain.

In making those discoveries, I have found that, in contrast to the longstanding scientific orthodoxy, Emotional Style arises partly from activity in regions involved in cognition, reason, and logic—functions that textbooks tell us are as unrelated to emotions as apples are to squid. That has come as a shock to defenders of the view that cognition—which many psychologists and neuroscientists consider the most exalted human capacity—and emotion (viewed as a lesser, almost animalistic trait) run on separate, mutually independent brain circuitry: the former in the “highly evolved” frontal cortex and the latter in the limbic system, which in humans is not much different from that of other animals. In showing that cognition and emotion are not so separate after all, these discoveries have rehabilitated emotion. From a behavior that was, as recently as the 1970s, studied for the most part only in rats and other lab animals, human emotion has now assumed as important a place in neuroscience as thinking.

Locating the bases of emotion at least partly in the brain’s seat of reason has several practical implications. None is more intriguing than this: it is possible to transform your Emotional Style through systematic mental practice.

It is hard to exaggerate what a break this is from the conventional wisdom in psychology and neuroscience. From the earliest days of brain mapping—determining which regions are responsible for which functions—neuroscientists traced feelings and thoughts to structures that were barely within hailing distance of each other. The limbic system deep in the brain, including the amygdala and hippocampus, seemed to be the brain’s holy terror of a 2-year-old, the site of anger, fear, and anxiety, as well as positive emotions. The frontal cortex, just behind the forehead, was the exalted thinker, where forethought and judgment, reason and volition, attention and cognition came from. As recently as the 1980s, neuroscientists focused almost exclusively on cognition and the other functions of the frontal cortex; emotions were deemed of so little interest that neuroscience left them to psychology.

The first crack in this wall came in the 1980s. The neurobiology of emotion was still a backwater, but a few scientists were beginning to pay more attention to feelings, particularly in the context of depression. Inspired by one of them, I launched experiments using electrodes to measure brain activity in people whose emotional state we manipulated in the lab. By showing them upsetting, fearful, or uplifting videos and photos, for instance, and monitoring their response, we discovered that how well and how quickly a person is able to bounce back from adversity has nothing to do with activity in what scientists identify as the brain’s emotion centers. Instead, the ability to vanquish feelings of grief, anger, or other negative emotions reflects activity in the prefrontal cortex. In this research, we found that Resilience—one of the six elements of Emotional Style—is marked by greater left versus right activation in the prefrontal cortex: a lack of Resilience comes from higher right prefrontal activation. The amount of activation in the left prefrontal region of a Resilient person can be 30 times that in someone who is not Resilient.

Almost immediately, we faced a new question: what does the prefrontal cortex do when it comes to emotion? After all, the prefrontal cortex was, and is, known to be the site of the highest of higher-order cognitive activity, the seat of judgment, planning, and other executive functions. How could it possibly play a role in a key element of our emotional lives?

One clue came from the large bundles of neurons running between certain regions of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in, among other things, negative emotion and distress, snapping to attention and activity when we feel anxious, afraid, or threatened. Perhaps the left prefrontal cortex inhibits the amygdala and, through this mechanism, helps to facilitate rapid recovery from adversity.

In a major experiment testing this idea, my colleagues and I fitted volunteers with electrodes to measure their brain activity and then showed them 51 pictures on a video monitor. One third of the pictures depicted upsetting images such as a baby with a tumor growing out of his eye; one third showed something happy, such as a radiant mother embracing her infant; one third showed a neutral scene such as a nondescript room. Sometimes during or after a picture, the volunteer would hear a short burst of noise that made him blink involuntarily. A large body of research had established that when people are in a negative emotional state, these blinks are a little stronger than when we are in a neutral emotional state, and much stronger than in a positive state.

What we found, in a nutshell, is that people with greater activation on the left side of the prefrontal cortex recovered much more quickly even from the strongest feelings of disgust, anger, and fear evoked by the images. From this, we inferred that the left prefrontal sends inhibitory signals to the amygdala, instructing it to quiet down. Activity in the left prefrontal cortex actually shortens the period of amygdala activation, allowing the brain to bounce back from an upsetting experience.

Thanks to MRI, we now also know that there is a second element at play: the more axons you have connecting one neuron to another between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, the more resilient you are. The less of this “white matter”—that is, the fewer the highways leading from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala—the less resilient you are.

In other words, both prefrontal-cortex activity and the number of pathways sending calming signals to the amygdala determine just how easily a person will bounce back from adversity. Through these two mechanisms, our “thinking brain” is able to calm our “feeling” self, enabling the brain to plan and act effectively without being distracted by negative emotion—not a bad working definition of Resilience.

This is the kind of statement that makes people worry: Oh great, I must not have many connections between my prefrontal cortex and amygdala, so I’m doomed to melt into a neurotic puddle every time I experience adversity. And indeed, for decades, neuroscientists assumed that the adult brain is essentially fixed in form and function.

We now know that this picture is wrong. Instead, the brain has a property called neuroplasticity, the ability to change its structure and function in significant ways. The brains of virtuoso violinists, for example, show a measurable increase in the size and activity of areas that control the fingers, and the brains of London taxicab drivers, who learn to navigate the complicated network of streets in that city, show a significant growth in the hippocampus, an area associated with context and spatial memory. But the brain can also change in response to messages generated internally—in other words, to our thoughts and intentions. In my favorite example of how “mere” thought can change the brain in fundamental ways, scientists led by Alvaro Pascual—Leone of Harvard University had volunteers imagine practicing a simple five-finger keyboard piece over and over for a week. Result: the region of the brain’s motor cortex that controls the fingers of the right hand expanded. Thinking, and thinking alone, had increased the amount of space the motor cortex devoted to a specific function.

When it comes to your Emotional Style, we know that changes to the neural structure of brain are possible. We don’t know exactly how much plasticity the brain has, but we do know that some neurally inspired interventions—forms of mental training that target patterns of brain activity—can work. Mental activity, ranging from meditation to cognitive-behavior therapy, can help you develop a broader awareness of social signals, a deeper sensitivity to your own feelings and bodily sensations, a more consistently positive outlook, and a greater capacity for Resilience. Do you feel yourself to be too negative in outlook? Pay heightened attention to the ways in which you can be more generous and upbeat, through processes therapists call “well-being therapy.” Are you very Self-Aware, so much so that your internal chatter threatens to take over your day-to-day life? Practice observing your thoughts, feelings, and sensations nonjudgmentally moment by moment.

This practice, known as “mindfulness meditation,” is one of the most effective tools for changing our Emotional Style. In patients with depression—whom we call “Slow to Recover” on the Resilience scale—every disappointment and setback is shattering. These patients need to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex (especially on the left side), to strengthen the neuronal highways between it and the amygdala, or both. Mindfulness meditation cultivates greater Resilience and faster recovery from setbacks by weakening the chain of associations that keep us obsessing about and even wallowing in a setback. It strengthens connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, promoting an equanimity that will help keep you from spiraling down. As soon as your thoughts begin to leap from one catastrophe to the next in this chain of woe, you have the mental wherewithal to pause, observe how easily the mind does this, note that it is an interesting mental process, and resist getting drawn into the abyss.

If you instead wish to move toward the Slow-to-Recover end of the Resilience dimension—perhaps you find you are not taking in the pain of others or yourself carefully enough—then you need to weaken connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. One strategy is to focus intently on whatever negative emotion or pain you are feeling, or the pain of someone you know. This can help sustain the emotion, at least for a time, and increase activation of your circuitry that is involved in pain and distress.

The goal here is not to go from one extreme to the other: I’m not trying to change you from Slow to Speedy (or vice versa) on the Resilience scale, or from Cassandra into Pollyanna in your Outlook. Changing the patterns of activity and even connectivity that underlie the facets of Emotional Style is highly personal. It depends on what works for you.

Credit to : http://digg.com

Father-Son Lessons - The 7 Most Important Things A Father Could Teach A Son

A real man knows how to empathize but stay true to his values at the same time." 

Whether or not you have kids, you should take a minute and identify some of the core values of fatherhood. Because when you do become a dad, you'll have to pass down those values to your children.  We asked you to weigh in on the most important lessons a father can teach a son. A ton of you answered. Here are the best replies. Responses have been edited for clarity.

1. Look People In The Eye

"I tell my three boys that if you want to be taken seriously in a room full of adults, always look people in the eye when you speak to them and always shake their hand in a firm, positive manner."

-Patrick

2. Be A Loving Husband

"Let your son witness you hugging your wife daily and let him hear you telling your wife you love her. Young boys use these experiences as examples for how to model their own relationships for the rest of their lives."

-Aaron J. Zach

3. Be compassionate but not a pushover

"One of the most important things a man should teach his son is how to be compassionate but not a pushover. A real man knows how to empathize but stay true to his values at the same time."

-Peter Low

4. Be Open-Minded

"Open-mindedness. Perhaps one of the most important principles we can teach our kids is how to think for themselves so they can develop into individuals, not mini versions of their dads, as cool as that sounds."

-Daniel Pawlak

5. Don't Expect The Worst In People

"A man should teach his son to treat others with kindness and respect. Every person deserves a clean slate and a kind reception when you meet them for the first time. Whether they then damage that perception is up to them."

-Zach

6. Expect to work hard

"A man should teach his son discipline and hard work so that he can carry through and be ready for life when he grows into the outer world. These things are to be taught by way of leading by example, focusing on first things first and helping him recognize how important it is to help others."

-Bruce

7. Take Nothing For Granted

"A man should teach his son to question everything and take nothing for granted. The son should also learn to respect women and how to clean up after himself. He should teach his son to be responsible and not to take any crap from anybody."

-J.J.

Read more: http://www.askmen.com

TOP 10 REASONS WHY THE WORLD WON'T END IN 2012

By Ray Villard

In the early days of computers, when hard drives weighed as much as a piece of furniture, a popular phrase was "Garbage-in, Garbage-out" (GIGO). It meant that computers would unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and produce nonsensical output. "GIGO" describes the abysmal lack of intelligent thought and critical thinking on the Internet when it comes to all the hysteria about the end of the world coming on December 21, 2012 -- just in time to ruin Christmas. I'm getting e-mail about this weekly and I expect the nonsense to ratchet up. This latest installment in decades of flaky astronomical apocalypse predictions is loosely based on the Mayan calendar that marks the end of a 5,126-year era.

Apparently the Mayans knew something about the heavens we don't, according to numerous hot-selling 2012 doomsday books on the market. Our multi-billion dollar telescopes, space probes, and 6,000 professional astronomers somehow just can't keep up with the mystic knowledge of an ancient superstitious culture. With the much-ballyhooed release of the film "2012" opening on November 13, end of world chatter will be the topic from backyard cookouts, to bars, to wine and cheese parties. I am listing the 10 most popular 2012 end-of-world scenarios and providing a quickie reference guide to use in politely dismissing any friends, relatives, or in-laws whose brains have turned into a pile of GIGO mush after being suckered by the End of Days hype.

The ten top 2012 doomsday scenarios:

10. Changes in the Sun's magnetic field will lead to powerful flares.

So what else is new under the sun? The sun goes though a well-documented 11-year sunspot cycle that is driven by its magnetic field entangling, reforming and flipping polarity. Yes, the peak of the next cycle is in 2012 (or 2013), and some predictions suggest it might be 30 to 50 percent stronger than the last peak.

But experts say it will certainly not be the biggest peak ever recorded.

The bottom line is that no dragon's breath of flame will stretch across 100 million miles of space and blowtorch Earth. The largest solar flare recorded to date, on Nov. 4, 2003, spewed several billions of tons of plasma in Earth's direction. The flare's X-ray radiation that impacted our protective atmosphere had the equivalent radiation of 5,000 suns.

We're still here.

9. The Earth's magnetic field will reverse.

Don't hold you breath. The last field reversal happened nearly 800,000 years ago. Fred Flintstone and our other ancestor cavemen survived. Geological evidence shows that the field has reversed its orientation tens of thousands of times over Earth history. Yet there is no definitive evidence that a magnetic field reversal has ever caused any mass extinction due to increased cosmic ray influx.

8. The Earth's rotation axis will tip.

This isn't nearly as easy as tipping cows. Unlike Mars, which does go though wide excursions in it axial tilt, Earth's tilt is kept steady by the gravitational influence of the moon. An object the size of Mars would have to hit Earth to transfer enough momentum to knock us out of kilter. But Mars-sized protoplanets were kicked into interstellar space over 4 billion years ago. The solar system doesn't make "planets-gone-wild" anymore.

7. A grand alignment of Jupiter and Saturn will gravitationally perturb Earth.

For the past several decades there have been doomsday claims that the combined gravity from grand planetary alignments will cause geologic and meteorological upheavals on Earth.

None are scheduled for 2012.

In 1962 an extremely rare grand conjunction of the classical naked-eye planets drove astrologers crazy. The conjunction happened on Feb. 4-5 and was accompanied by a solar eclipse! The most infamous grand conjunction was in 1982 and popularized in a book called "The Jupiter Effect," which predicted earthquakes and massive tides. Life went on as usual both years. The moon has a vastly greater gravitational influence on Earth than Jupiter. It's called location, location, location! At a whopping distance of 400 million miles from Earth, Jupiter's tug is pretty wimpy.

6. The Sun will align with the galactic equator on the winter solstice.

So what? These are simply coordinates in the sky. It has no physical reality any more than the intersection of Broadway and 7th Avenue at Times Square influences the geology of Manhattan Island. This is greatly confused with the fact that the sun's position actually oscillates up and down as it orbits the galaxy, like a horse on a carousel.

We pass through the galactic plane every 35 to 40 million years. It's possible that an increased number of comets might be hurled towards the Earth because of gravitational interaction with the densest parts of our galaxy during this passage. But we are talking about the consequences spanning many thousands of years, not crashing down on our heads in any one specific year.

5. The black hole in the galactic center will affect us.

The Milky Way's black hole has no influence on the galactic disk. The black hole is three million solar masses. The Milky Way is several trillion solar masses when we add the tug of dark matter. Any gravitational influence of the black hole over the galaxy would be like the tail wagging the dog. The Milky Way's collision with the Andromeda galaxy will dump gas into the black hole and it will blaze as a quasar. But that's several billion years away.

4. An asteroid will smash into Earth.

A threatening near-Earth asteroid that's gotten the most press is the 900-foot wide Apophis. But its chances of collision have been downgraded to 1 in 250,000 at its next close approach in 2029. In theory, an uncharted asteroid or comet could come out of the blue tomorrow. But if we don't know about it today, the Mayans certainly didn't know about it 1,200 years ago. Earth-killer impacts are tens of millions of years apart. So there's no reason to be a doomsday clock-watcher.

3. The rogue planet Nibiru will swing by Earth.

There isn't such a planet any more than the planet Naboo from the Star Wars trilogy is real. Purported Internet pictures of the interloper are photographic lens flares or hoaxes. Don't believe every dot you see photographed in the sky.

2. Supernovae or hypernovae will irradiate Earth.

There are no stars that are so close to Earth that radiation from their supernova demise would seriously affect us. The nearest candidate, the red giant Betelgeuse, is predicted to explode in the next 1,000 years. The monster star Eta Carinae is also on a short fuse. Neither doomed star has a spin axis precisely aimed at Earth, so we don't have to worry about being fried by a narrow beam of gamma rays ejected from the core's implosion. In fact the kinds of stars that shoot out these Death Star beams are uncommon in the Milky Way. Earth has a one percent chance of getting zapped over 10 billion years. Scratch gamma ray bursts off of your homeowner's insurance policy.

1. A cloud of negative energy engulfs the solar system.

Wow! A dark cloud with a bad attitude! This sound suspiciously like a Star Trek episode. Dark energy is all around us already, but it is not packaged into clouds. The same goes for dark matter.

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'Half-Sheep Half-Human' Baby Causes Outrage In Sokoto, Northwest Nigeria

A sheep has allegedly given birth to a ‘half-sheep half-human’ baby in Sokoto, Nigeria. Local newspaper the Daily Sun reported that after vets delivered the odd-looking lamb at Fakon Idi Veterinary Clinic on 22 January, thousands of curious onlookers were drawn to the clinic. The “mutant” sheep caused outrage among the gathered locals, reported the paper, believing the bloated "half-sheep half-human" to be the result of bestiality or witchcraft. Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NCDSC) had to step in to disperse the crowd, who were demanding the owner of the sheep to identify himself.

However “mutant” looking lambs have been birthed before, notably in Turkey, when a sheep was helped by vets deliver a baby with a head that appeared to have human features. Although the lamb remained alive for some hours, spooked locals eventually slaughtered the animal. In Nigeria, Vets from the Fakon Idi clinic were far more rational in their explanation for the lamb’s appearance Dr Ismail Usman, who helped deliver the lamb, described the rumours going round about the baby as “embarrassing”. “It was a surprise that people’s perspective could be so negative when it comes to scientific reasoning and thoughts," he told the Daily Sun. He said it was more likely the lamb looked so strange because the sheep had been two days overdue and had suffered problems during the pregnancy.

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The Secret to Cheaper, Greener Local Beer

Brewing beer is, in theory, fairly simple. A small farmer can grow all the barley and the hops needed on a little plot of land—it’s easier to grow than corn. And a microbrewery can pump out a few humble barrels of finished beer in anything from a spare room to sprawling warehouse.

But a step in the middle can stand in the way. Malting the barley—soaking, drying and then heating the grains to turn their starches into simple sugar ready to ferment—is more complicated. In fact, it can be something of a bottleneck for brewers like Dustin Brau, CEO of Brau Brothers Brewery in tiny Lucan, Minnesota.

“There aren’t a lot of maltsters, so what you get is a lot of breweries buying from a relatively [small] number of maltsters worldwide,” he says.

That homogenizes the final product, which is not a compliment from a booster of microbrews. Malting also drives up the carbon footprint needed to make the beer—and the limited number of malt suppliers ramps up the price, with Brau estimating that about 75 percent of his costs come in shipping and processing malt.

But Brau hopes that his brewery will rely less on the malting process in the future. His company has completed the first test batch of malt-less beer to prove they don’t need a costly middle-man for a great tasting brew. The small batch of a few hundred cases of Bohemian Soup beer, an Eastern European-style pilsner, went on sale around Minnesota and at brewers’ conventions.

The secret to making the raw barley beer is an enzyme additive called Ondea Pro. Normally, brewers rely on malting to produce natural enzymes that help turn starch in the grain into sugar, which the yeast is then able to chomp on during the all-important fermentation process—when the beer becomes beer. Ondea Pro allows brewers to skip malting (and the expense and energy costs that come with it) to make beer with unmalted grains.

"Even for a very efficient malting process, brewing with unmalted barley reduced the overall carbon footprint of beer production by eight percent," says Adam Monroe, President of Novozymes North America, the company that makes Ondea Pro. "We also documented a seven percent reduction in the amount of barley required to produce the same amount of beer, thereby improving land utilization and earnings."

This isn't going to close the hole in the ozone layer, but incremental efficiency should be recognized. The company estimates that if 10 percent of global beer production is converted to unmalted barley—a pie-in-the-sky dream at this point—the potential savings could equal more than 350,000 tons of CO2, about the same as taking 85,000 cars off the road.

For Brau, it's less C02 savings than local flavor that drew him to drop the malting process.

“One thing that intrigued us about raw barley beer,” Braus says, was “being able to pull barely straight from field and cut out the middle man.”

Typically, farmers to sell barley en masse to a maltster, who refines the product and sells it to brewers. Instead, Brau wants to buy direct from the farmers, saving money, reducing shipping costs, and ideally finding a few new flavors in the process. Absent the homogenizing influence of bulk-bought barley and centralized malting, each region’s unique barley would increase the variety of beers available.

One obstacle standing in the way: The farmers near Brau Brewing don’t grow much barley now, so Brau is growing it himself right next door, enough for a few hundred barrels next growing season. His production capacity for Bohemian Soup is limited largely by the dearth of local grains.

 “We need to convince some local farmers to grow it, then we can expand,” he says.

That’s why he’s showing off his beer at brewing conventions and touting the process in the media. He needs other breweries to follow his lead and create enough demand that farmers have an incentive to switch from corn or other crops to beer grains. There’s a good financial reason for him to expect success.

“It could potentially make beer cheaper,” he says. Grain prices rose as much as thirty percent last year. “You’ve already seen [the price of beer] go up and you will probably see it going up even more.”

Brau makes a good case, pun intended.

Photo courtesy of Brau Brothers Brewing Company.

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