Types of Phobia Part 2

Types of Phobia

True or False: Do female Gorillasand Monkeys Menstruate

Most monkeys living in Africa and Asia, such as rhesus macaques, menstruate. Great apes do it too. Menstrual bleeding is easily detectable in chimpanzees and gibbons. However, gorillas and orang-utans bleed less copiously, so menstruation is only visible on closer inspection.

True or False: Do Lightning Twice at the same place?

 
Lightning never strikes the same place twice. TRUTH: The old saying that 'lightning never strikes the same place twice' is another myth that any veteran storm observer or researcher has seen nature defy. Lightning can strike any location more than once.

Tomatoes covered in ash from the eruption of Mount Sinabung

Tomatoes covered in ash from the eruption of Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra, Indonesia on August 26th 2016 (AFP)

True or False:Urinating to Prevent Pregnancy

Going to the bathroom after sex does not lower your chances of getting pregnant.

Even if urine had the ability to kill sperm, peeing wouldn’t have any effect on the sperm that have already entered the vagina, because urine comes out your urethral opening (aka pee hole – which is different from your vaginal opening). It’s a different set of plumbing, basically.

Once the semen goes into the vagina, there’s nothing you can do to get it back out again (douching, showering, jumping up and down, swearing you’ll never have unprotected sex again, etc.). Those li’l guys are in there and they’re not leaving. So at that point, if you’re not already on a form of birth control, you’cd want to consider emergency contraception instead. (Click here to learn more about emergency contraception.)

The only things that actually, in real life, reduce the risk of getting pregnant are:

Keeping sperm way, way, way far away from the vaginal opening. That would involve not having intercourse, and making sure that no semen ends up on the vulva. And preferably no pre-cum either, since there’s a slight chance it could have active sperm in itCorrectly and consistently using a form of effective birth control.  You can use our My Method tool to help you figure out which one might be best for you.  You might even want to consider using a condom plus another form of birth control (like the pyill,  NuvaRing, or an IUD).Using emergency contraception (aka the morning-after pill) within five days of unprotected sex.

Scientists Claim Suya is Healthier with Beer

A group of researchers at the University of Porto, in Portugal, have said that barbecued meat, popularly known as suya, in Nigeria is healthier when cooked and eaten with beer.

The lead author of the study, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry,  Dr.  Isabel Ferreira, said the recommendation was given following the results  of various experiments conducted by the scientists.

According to Ferreira, cancer-causing chemicals and molecules such as The PAHs are formed through the process of grilling or barbecuing meat and some chemical in beer could neutralise these free radicals.She said, “One way of stopping PAH-formation might be to apply chemicals called antioxidants that mop up free radicals. And beer is rich in these, in the shape of melanoidins, which form when barley is roasted.”

In one of the experiments, Ferraira  and her colleagues prepared some beer marinades, bought some meat and headed for the griddle.

“One of their marinades was based on Pilsner, a pale lager. A second was based on a black beer, since black beers have more melanoidins than light beers—as the name suggests, they give it colour.” The meat steeped in the black-beer marinade formed fewer PAHs than those steeped in the light-beer marinade, which in turn formed fewer than the control meat left unmarinated in beer,” she stated.

She noted that the meat that was not cooked with beer when cooked had an average of 21 nanogrammes (billionths of a gramme) of PAHs per gramme of grilled meat, while those marinated in black beer averaged only 10 nanogrammes of PAH.

Ferreira, however, cautioned against over consumption of barbecued meat with beer or other forms of alcohol that may not have been sourced from barley.

Ice Bucket Challenge's 2nd anniversary celebrates its gene discovery

The campaign that encouraged millions of people to dump buckets of ice-cold water over their heads raised enough money to help make an important research breakthrough, the ALS Association announced Monday.

The massive, socially-driven fund raising push saw 17 million people posting videos online and a slew of celebrities from Bill Gates to Steph Curry getting soaked to raise awareness for ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease.

The disease causes nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord to gradually deteriorate. Within two to five years of diagnosis, patients lose their ability to breathe, leading to their death.

n just eight weeks, $115 million was donated to the ALS Association, 67% of which was dedicated to advancing research for treatments and a cure, the non-profit reports.

Tips for the Health Conscious Traveler

1. Seek out special wellness perks. 

Some hotels offer free yoga classes and workout studios and will rent exercise gear in case you forgot anything at home. 

2. Ask for a jogging map. 

Many concierges can suggest routes for runners that include great views and sightseeing.

3. Research local dining options for salads and smoothies. 

Also check the room-service menu online ahead of time to see if it ­offers healthy options in a pinch. 

4. Ensure the hotel room is spotless.

Don’t be afraid to ask if all the bedding has been changed or to request hypoallergenic pillows. See if the hotel has duvets (rather than comforters) since their covers are easier to clean. The Chamberlain in West Hollywood has premium duvets and bedding in each room.

5. Ask for a room with a standing shower. 

Bathtubs and Jacuzzis are notoriously difficult to clean. 

6. Request a room that is smoke-free and restricts pets.

Avoid dander and lingering allergens. Pet-friendly rooms often have strong chemical odors.

7. Wear socks around the hotel room to protect against germs. 

Never go barefoot.

8. Use antibacterial wipes

on in-room phones, remotes, light switches, faucets, and alarm clocks. 

9. Use the individually wrapped paper or plastic cups

in the room instead of glassware, which might be cleaned only with a rag and can of antibacterial spray.

10. Ask for room upgrades to preferred-guest floors.

These receive the most vigilant housekeeping and are the least noisy. They’re often far from hotel bars and have the best views. 

Dinosaurs were already on a slow decline before meteor hit

Dinosaurs were already on a slow decline for at least 50 million years before a massive meteorite smashed into Earth and exterminated them, according to new research.

It may sound cold, but here's how lead researcher, Dr. Manabu Sakamoto, palaeontologist from University of Reading in the UK described it: "It is clear that they [dinosaurs] were already past their prime in an evolutionary sense."

Dinosaur diversity was already dropping for millions of years. It didn't matter what type of dinosaur -- a T. rex or brachiosaurus -- they had all been on a decline, according to the research published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers drew the conclusion after analyzing lineages on the dinosaurs using fossil information and computing statistics.

"All the evidence shows that the dinosaurs, which had already been around, dominating terrestrial ecosystems for 150 million years, somehow lost the ability to speciate fast enough," said Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol, one of the co-authors in a press release statement. "This was likely to have contributed to their inability to recover from the environmental crisis caused by the impact."

It is widely believed that a massive asteroid struck into the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago, with its impact producing tons of dust, blackening out the sun, and eventually killing all the plants and dinosaurs on Earth. But it had been a mystery whether dinosaurs were thriving before the asteroid hit.

"While a sudden apocalypse may have been the final nail in the coffin, something else had already been preventing dinosaurs from evolving new species as fast as old species were dying out," said Sakamoto. "This suggests that for tens of millions of years before their ultimate demise, dinosaurs were beginning to lose their edge as the dominant species on Earth."

Aloe Vera Gel and its Many Benefits

USE ALOE VERA FOR THE SKIN
Apply the gel from an aloe vera leaf directly onto skin abrasions, cuts, sunburns, scalds, blisters, cold sores, rashes, and insect bites to help fight bacteria and avoid infection. The gel also has the ability to soothe pain and regenerate skin cells to promote healing with no or little scaring. Apply aloe gel 2-3 times a day to the area/wound until it is healed.

Use aloe vera gel for general skin care. Use the gel alone or along with your favorite skin cream to help better soften and moisturize the skin. Because aloe regenerates skin cells it is also known to reduce wrinkles, eczema, acne, sun/age spots, and other blemishes. It is also gentle enough to use to care for the tender skin after radiation therapy.

The gel taken from the aloe vera plant can also be combined with wheat-germ oil and safflower flower to reduce bruising.

ALOE ON THE SCALP AND HAIR
Applying aloe vera gel to the scalp is a good treatment for dandruff, seborrhea (dermatitis), psoriasis and hair loss that has resulted from these conditions.

Use the gel from an aloe vera plant to substitute your commercial hair gel; rub or comb small amounts through your hair and style as usual.

USE ALOE VERA FOR PERIODONTAL CARE
Apply aloe vera gel directly to damaged or diseased gums to reduce inflammation, pain, and to promote healing. Include aloe gel in dental hygiene regimens to help fight tooth decay and reduce plaque.

ALOE FOR EYE CARE
To create an eyewash, dissolve ½ tsp of powdered aloe gel in one cup of water. To accelerate the healing process add one teaspoon of boric acid. Pour the solution through a coffee filter before applying to the eyes.

ALOE FOR STRAINS AND MUSCLE PAINS
Because the gel of the aloe vera plant is known to absorb quickly into the skin and reduce inflammation and pain, it also works well on sprains, strains, muscle pains and arthritic pain. Apply aloe gel along with a cold compress to the sore area 2-3 times per day.

USE ALOE FOR INTERNAL BENEFITS
Aloe gel is believed to provide relief from stomach disorders, kidney ailments, and headaches, just to name a few of aloe's internal healing benefits.

Using the yellow juice, called latex found just beneath the surface of the leaves can serve as a powerful laxative.

The gel from aloe vera also contains magnesium lactate that serves as an antihistamine, which may help to relieve sinus and chest inflammations caused by allergies.

Because aloe can have a strong laxative affect do not ingest the yellow latex found in the skin of the leaf or be cautious of the amount taken as a laxative. It is best to ingest aloe by gently blending the gel, taken from between the leafs, in a blender with juice or water.

GROW YOUR OWN ALOE VERA PLANT
Using pure aloe vera gel from its plant form is best, as its cellular activity tends to be reduced when mixed with other chemicals.

Growing your own aloe vera plant can be fairly easy as its only requirements are lots of warm sun and little water. It does not like cold temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit or cold, drafty areas. It takes the aloe vera plant about 4 years to reach full maturity of about two feet tall, which is when the gel from an aloe vera leaf holds its greatest benefits. Be sure to transplant it to larger pots as it outgrows it's current one.

How to Make Aloe Vera Juice

Gather everything you will need to make your aloe vera juice. This is important because fresh aloe vera gel oxidizes very quickly once ex[posed to air, which makes it important to immediately extract and process the gel once you harvest the aloe vera leaf.

Harvest one or more leaves from your aloe vera plant. Use the paring knife to trim off the thorny edges of the leaf., and then rinse in cold water.

Split the aloe leaf into two halves. Scoop out the clear, translucent, inner gel from the split leaf.

Put the aloe vera gel into a blender, and add some citrus juice, such as orange or grapefruit. The juice helps to briefly stabilize the exposed aloe vera gel, as well as enhancing the taste. Blend these ingredients for about two minutes.

Pour the aloe vera juice into an airtight container. Refrigerate your homemade aloe Vera juice. It will stay fresh up to a week, but is at it most potent in terms of health benefits, if consumed within two days.

Stir two tablespoons of the blended aloe vera gel in a glass of water to make a glass of aloe vera juice. You can tone down or enhance the flavor by substituting fruit juice for the water.

8 Easy Ways to Kill Bad Habits, According to Research

Summary

Here’s how to get rid of those awful bad habits:

• One at a time. Beat one bad habit per month and in a year you’ll be awesome.
• Don’t stop. Just count. Don’t eliminate the bad behavior just yet. First, be consistent in your awfulness.
• Don’t change you. Change your world. 20 second rule. Make it harder to engage in bad habits.
• Chill, dude. Stress makes the bad stuff tempting. Relax and you’ll behave better.
• Don’t eliminate. Replace. You can’t kill bad habits but you can swap them out for new ones.
• “If” and “Then.” A simple plan for how you’ll beat temptation helps you beat temptation.
• Forgive yourself. Beating yourself up makes you behave worse. Self-compassion keeps you going.

1) Change A Bad Habit. Singular.

At one time we have all felt as if our lives are a constellation of bad habits. You get home from work, you’re exhausted and you go from one “I should not be doing this” to the next.

It’s like you need to change everything. And you need to do it tomorrow… No. Bad. Wrong. Does not compute.

Do less. Just focus on fixing one thing at a time. When I spoke to Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg, he said that’s the key to lasting change. Here’s Charles:

If you try to transform everything at once, it tends to be very, very destabilizing. In general, what people should do, is they should think of change as a project. It’s a project that takes a while… Now, it might feel frustrating to say, “If you have ten habits you want to change, that means it’s going to take eight months or nine months.” The truth of the matter is if this is a behavior that’s really important, changing it will have this huge impact on your life. It’s worth spending a month to change one behavior permanently. You’re going to be reaping the benefits of that for the next decade.

You don’t need to overhaul your life. Just kill one bad habit. Give it a month and then move on to the next.

2) Don’t Stop. Just Count.

Whatever it is you shouldn’t be doing, you don’t have to stop yet. (Doesn’t that sound nice?) Don’t try to reduce the habit, reduce the variability in the habit.

In other words, don’t even try to quit smoking; try to smoke the exact same number of cigarettes each day. Or only check Facebook your usual 90 times an hour.

This tiny effort toward self-control can lead to a decrease in bad habits over time, unconsciously.

Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:

Behavioral economist Howard Rachlin proposes an interesting trick for overcoming the problem of always starting a change tomorrow. When you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself. He has shown that smokers asked to try to smoke the same number of cigarettes every day gradually decrease their overall smoking— even when they are explicitly told not to try to smoke less.

Just paying attention to those numbers can make a big difference. Merely looking at the calorie counts on food labels before eating was more effective for weight loss than exercise:

Label users who did not exercise displayed a slightly greater likelihood of weight loss than those who exercised but did not read food labels. Additionally, those who only read labels were more likely to improve their chances of weight loss by adding exercise to their routines rather than abandoning label usage in favor of exercise.

You don’t have to deny yourself at first. Just notice the numbers and continue to behave badly — butconsistently.

3) Don’t Change You. Change Your World.

Don’t change yourself. Change your context. We engage in habits because of “triggers” in our environment. Remove the triggers or make them more difficult to reach and you’re less likely to engage in the behavior.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely he said context affects your behavior much, much more than you think. Here’s Dan:

One of the big lessons from social science in the last 40 years is that environment matters. If you go to a buffet and the buffet is organized in one way, you will eat one thing. If it’s organized in a different way, you’ll eat different things. We think that we make decisions on our own but the environment influences us to a great degree. Because of that we need to think about how to change our environment.

So get the tempting stuff away from you. Bestselling author Shawn Achorrecommends “the 20 second rule.” Make bad habits 20 seconds harder to begin and you’re far less likely to engage in them. Here’s Shawn:

Watching too much television? Merely take out the batteries of the remote control creating a 20 second delay and it dramatically decreases the amount of television people will watch.

You don’t need to change yourself just yet. Change the things around you.

4) Chill, Dude.

What makes you more likely to engage in bad habits? Stress.

UCLA neuroscientist Alex Korb says staying relaxed helps your brain make the right choices. Here’s Alex:

I have a friend who always says, “Stress takes the prefrontal cortex offline.” Stress changes the dynamics of that conversation. It weakens the prefrontal cortex. That part of your brain doesn’t have infinite resources. It can’t be eternally vigilant and so while it’s not paying attention, your striatum is like, “Let’s go eat a cookie. Let’s go drink a beer.” Anything that you can do to reduce stress can help strengthen the prefrontal cortex’s control over your habits.

Don’t pressure yourself. Stay calm and you’ll behave better.

5) Don’t Eliminate Bad Habits. Replace Them.

Ironically, studies show saying, “I’ll never do that again” makes you even more likely to do that again.

Charles Duhigg wrote the book on habits. And he says the research is clear: you can’t eliminate bad habits but you can replace them. Want to stop shoving donuts in your mouth?

When you feel the urge, put some sugarless gum in your piehole. The “trigger” stays the same and you still get a nice reward but you’re replacing the bad behavior with a good one.

Notice what triggers your bad behavior and then replace your usual response with a new one that gives you a different (but still pleasurable) reward.

6) “If” and “Then”

Plans are good. And with a very simple one you can resist temptation. From Nine Things Successful People Do Differently:

It’s called if-then planning, and it is a really powerful way to help you achieve any goal. Well over a hundred studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take specific actions to reach your goal (e.g., “If it is 4 p.m., then I will return any phone calls I should return today”) can double or triple your chances for success

7) Forgive Yourself.

You’re going to screw up. And that’s okay. In Richard Wiseman’s study of people who achieved their goals he realized we should:

Expect to revert to your old habits from time to time. Treat any failure as a temporary set-back rather than a reason to give up altogether.

So you say you’re not going to eat cookies. Then you accidentally eat a cookie. That’s not when the diet is blown.

The diet is blown when you eat the one cookie and say, “I give up” — and then devour the rest of the bag.

8. Peer pressure is a good thing — when you use it strategically. Mom wanted you to hang out with the smart kids in school because they provided good examples. Mom was right.

It’s simple, really. Hang out with people who you want to be. Procrastinate a lot? Spend more time with uber-productive friends. Want to get in shape? Hang around those healthy-eating gym addicts.