Nov 8, 2013

Blood Pressure

Blood pressure is the intrinsic pressure within your arteries and veins. Your body needs this pressure to adequately supply all your tissues and organs with nutrients. Like the plumbing in your house, adequate pressure is needed, but if that pressure gets too high it causes problems.

High blood pressure is a combination of environmental risk factors and genes. High blood pressure is defined as any systolic pressure (top number) above 140 or diastolic (bottom number) higher than 90.

High blood pressure is not a disease itself, but indicates a risk factor for several other conditions like heart attack, stroke, and kidney failure. The most beneficial way to control blood pressure is naturally. This is because medications that control blood pressure come with serious side effects. These side effects can sometimes be more harmful than the high blood pressure itself.

Things like lack of exercise and bad eating habits can cause a buildup of plaque inside your arteries. Excessive plaque on the interior walls of your arteries makes them smaller, known as “Atherosclerosis”. When the pipes that transport fluid get smaller, the pressure that same volume of fluid exerts goes up. If the blood pressure gets too high, arteries have a greater chance of bursting. Arteries get larger or smaller depending on the needs of the body. Excessive plaque makes this increasingly more difficult for a body to achieve.

A person’s blood pressure can also be too high due to genetics. A landmark study published in Nature in 2011 found 29 genetic variants that affected blood pressure. The authors found any one variant in a gene did not increase risk of hypertension, but people with multiple variants were much more likely to have high blood pressure.

Bat Myths Debunked

Bats eyes are very functional. Bats' retinas have an abundance of rods (a prerequisite for night vision) and also two types of cones: the ordinary, that serves them well in daylight conditions, and UV-sensitive that gives them night vision. Bats use, but do not depend exclusively on their sonar. Some bats can see better than others, but none are blind. Some varieties of bats can see color and others can only see black and white.

Bats groom themselves by meticulously licking and scratching themselves and each other for hours. Bats are the only mammals that can fly. An average bat lives about thirty years.  Out of the 900 species of bats, there are only three vampire bats in the entire world and they are generally found in South America. The remaining species of bats over the world feed off of fruit, nectar, pollen, and insects.

Wayback Machine

Did you know there is a site that serves up web pages that are no longer active? The site is https://archive.org/web/ and is known as the Wayback Machine, because it goes way back to show pages that have long since been gone. It works kind of like Google, but for old, rather than current web pages. Interesting place to go if you are looking for old facts or to check how a story changes over time. It is especially interesting to see how politicians change their story depending on which way the wind blows.

Nov 1, 2013

Happy Friday

All things grow with time -

Especially the joy of a Happy Friday!

Daylight Savings

Nov 3, 2013 is time to turn back your clocks. Benjamin Franklin often gets credited with the idea, but he only mentioned it in jest in a satirical essay. The idea was never seriously pushed until 1895 when George Vernon Hudson, presented the idea as a way for people to have more daylight and consequently more leisure time after work. While there was interest in Hudson’s idea, it still didn't catch on until 1916 when Germany adopted DST as a method to save fuel during World War I. Others, including the US and Great Britain, used DST during World War I and II, yet reverted to standard time during peace years.

It wasn't until about 40 years ago, during the energy crisis of the 1970s, that Daylight Savings Time was made permanent in many areas.

Wordology

 I find it fascinating how some words can be a definition of themselves, such as 'word' is a word that tells us it is a word. Here are a few more self explanatory words:
English - Not German
Erudite - Scholarly word that means scholarly.
Noun - Is a noun
Used - This word has been used
Polysyllabic - This word has multiple syllables
Common - This word is
Unhyphenated - This word is
Floccinaucinihilipilificatious - A worthless word meaning to estimate worthless
Obfuscatory - Is and means not easy to understand
Suffixed - Has a suffix
Hyphen-bearing - Contains a hyphen
Monepic - Describes a one-word sentence
Cacophony - Sounds like and describes disagreeable sounds
Parallel - The Ls are

Texas Motor Speedway

Last chance, NASCAR is out with a beer-and-bacon milkshake combining real bits of bacon with vanilla ice cream and half a bottle of Rahr & Sons Ugly Pug Black Lager. It is a 16-ounce drink, dubbed the "Shake'N Bacon Brew," and will be available for NASCAR's AAA Texas 500 races (Fort Worth, Texas) until Nov. 3. The bacon bits are candied and bacon-flavored syrup is also added into the mix. The whole thing is topped with whipped cream. Thought you might like to know.

What's in a Name, Snake Oil

Snake oil is now a generic term meaning a substance with no medicinal value sold as a remedy for physical ailments. The term most likely comes from the use of oil derived from Chinese water snakes as a topical lotion. Chinese immigrants working on the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s would use it to alleviate joint pain. This ancient Chinese remedy was laughed at by other medicine salesmen, who called it a scam. In time, the term “snake oil” developed a negative connotation.

In the mid-1980s, a California psychiatrist named Richard Kunin decided to explore the question if snake oil was quackery or was it a legitimate treatment for joint pain, like the Chinese laborers claimed it was. He shared his findings in a 1989 letter to the Western Journal of Medicine.

Snake oil, especially the oil from the fatty tissue found in Chinese water snakes was unusually high in omega-3 fats. Kunin concluded, this meant that it could actually do what its advocates claimed, "snake oil is a credible anti-inflammatory agent and might confer therapeutic benefits. Since essential fatty acids are known to absorb transdermally, it is not far-fetched to think that inflamed skin and joints could benefit by the actual anti-inflammatory action of locally applied oil just as the Chinese physicians and our medical quacks have claimed.”

Kunin believed that snake oil actually worked. Subsequent research suggests that he was right. Unfortunately, while Kunin’s conclusions are mostly correct, there is one significant omission. The Chinese snake oil came from water snakes, which, perhaps coincidentally fed on fish which themselves contained high amounts of omega-3 fatty acids. American-sold snake oil came from rattlesnakes, which do not have anywhere nearly the omega-3 amounts needed to provide the promised therapeutic benefits.

A Diversion

This guy moves like Mercury. If you want to give your mind a break for a few minutes, watch this video.   LINK

Still More Inventions by Women

In 1949, Marion Donovan's first successful invention called "Boaters" was a waterproof baby diaper cover that prevented diaper rash. She also created the disposable diapers, Pampers in 1961.

Hedy Lamarr the actress, patented a secret communications system in 1941. The system manipulated radio frequencies with an unbreakable code to prevent classified messages from being intercepted by enemies. The device was meant to be used against the Nazis in WWII, but in actuality it came into use 20 years later. Lamarr was raised in Austria, grew to despise the Nazis and eventually escaped to London and then to the U.S.

African American, Alice H. Parker filed the first U.S. patent for the precursor to a central heating system in 1919. The system was able to regulate the temperature of a building and carry heat from room to room. The drawings included for the patent show a heating furnace powered by gas. An entire house required several heating units, each controlled by individual hot air ducts. The ducts directed heat to different parts of a building structure.

BMI and Life Expectancy

A comprehensive review published in 2013 in the 'Journal of the American Medical Association' examined the relationship of BMI (Body Mass Index) to death rates. The study researchers found that increasing levels of obesity were associated with progressively higher premature death rates.

Mildly obese people, however, did not have a significantly greater risk of death compared to those with a normal BMI. In fact, the finding that people classified as overweight but not obese had a lower overall death rate compared to those with a normal BMI. Researchers are exploring possible reasons for this finding.

The 'International Journal of Obesity' published a study in 2012 comparing BMI and waist circumference as predictors of life expectancy. The authors reported that waist circumference is a better predictor of death from any cause than BMI. The researchers also found that adults with a high waist circumference had an increased risk of death regardless of BMI. Although neither BMI nor waist size can accurately foretell the life expectancy of any individual, waist circumference may be a better tool for estimating longevity. In other words, they are saying 'we cannot accurately tell life expectancy with either of these measurements, but it does help get us grants and headlines'.

New Potato Chip Flavor

Starting this month, Lay's Canada has a new flavor, 'Maple Moose'. Trying them will not be on my to do list.

Six Cooking Tips from HGTV

When you deep-fry, hold each piece of food with long tongs as you add it to the oil. Hold it just below the oil's surface for five seconds before releasing it. This will seal the exterior and stop it from sticking to the pot or the other food.

If you need more oil in the pan when sautéing, add it in a stream along the edges of the pan so that by the time the oil reaches the ingredient being cooked, it will be heated.

Do not use oil in the water when boiling pasta, because it will keep the sauce from sticking to the cooked pasta. Also, After you drain pasta, while it's still hot, grate some fresh Parmesan on top before tossing it with your sauce to give the sauce something to stick to.

When making burgers, add in a bit (or a lot) of bacon bits or pork bits while mixing for added flavor.

When making mashed potatoes, after you drain the potatoes, return them to the hot pan, cover tightly and let steam for 5 minutes. This allows the potatoes to mash with a beautiful texture and soak up the butter and cream more easily.

New Non Religion

The Jedi census is a grassroots movement that was created in 2001 for citizens of a number of English-speaking countries to record their religion as "Jedi" or "Jedi Knight" on the national census. The campaign was loosely organized by circulating e-mails claiming that if enough people entered "Jedi", it would be recognized as an official religion by the government. The emails also implored people to report their religion as "Jedi", "Because you love Star Wars" or "just to annoy people".

If Jedi had been counted as an answer in the 2001 census it would have been the second largest religion in New Zealand.