Personal

Prevent Workout Mishaps

Posted on May 24, 2010 at 8:13 am

How many times have you exercised and found yourself hurt or in pain? Age does make it more difficult to perform hard exercises. Moderate exercises are better, but they still don’t spare you from acquiring possible exercise-related injury. Exercises, whether light or heavy, require moving joints, ligaments and muscles. Over exertion of these can cause undue strain and possible injury. Warm up- studies are still ongoing to determine the best warm-up technique for injury prevention, but the warm-up in general is accepted as a key to safe and effective exercise.

Effective warm-ups increase heart rate and breathing and slightly increase the temperature and muscle tissue, warm-up to the point where you have raised a light sweat. Before general fitness exercise, do 5 to 10 minutes of warm-up. Before exercises at higher level or a special sporting goal, do a longer warm-up, one designed specifically for your sport.

To stop a cold

Posted on April 6, 2010 at 8:12 am

In this age of high-tech gadgets, nascent commercial space travel and effective cures for many cancers, it is mind-boggling how science still hasn’t found a cure for the common cold! And the prospects of finding one soon are pretty dim: more than 200 different viruses can cause the common cold and figuring out how to fight each one is a mammoth undertaking that will take researchers ages to complete.

With billions of cold cases occurring worldwide each year, and modern medicine offering only to alleviate cold symptoms, it’s easy to see why there’s a myriad of traditional common cold remedies for people to choose from. But which remedies really work and which one don’t? Remedy #1: Chicken soap has been used at least 12th century as a common cold home remedy. Remedy #2: hot toddies, or mixed drinks that are served warm, can likewise soothe cough and sore throat symptoms and help a cold sufferer fall asleep.

How senses combine

Posted on December 12, 2009 at 7:58 am

Today scientists have new tools for studying synethesia. Medical imaging techniques such as positron-emission tomography scans can actually show activity in different parts of the brain. Specific brain regains process different kinds of information. When people aare given PET scans which listening to recorded words, the part of the brain associated with language shows activity. But in colored-language synthetes, so does a part of the brain that’s associated with sorting images by color. Tests like this show that synthesia is real, even if some people faked it in past.

The tests don’t explain why only some people have this ability, however. One possible answer is that the brains of synthetes are “cross-wired”. That is, nerves may connect different regions of the brain more strongly in these people than in other. An area that handles colors may be strongly linked to areas that handle language, so that hearing words activates both areas.

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