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Sunday, June 26th, 2022
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13:54
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| Saturday, June 18th, 2022
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10:46
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| Tuesday, June 14th, 2022
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12:53
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The Modern Diet Is a Biosecurity Threat
"During the late Victorian period, there was clear evidence of a worsening in health. By the Boer War at the turn of the century, 50 percent of young working-class recruits were so malnourished as to be fully unfit for service—a problem that had never been reported during the Asante or Zulu Wars in the early 1870s. In 1901, the British infantry was forced to drop its minimum height for recruits from 5’ 4” to 5’. The British government responded by setting up a “Committee on Physical Deterioration,” in order to address a problem that had not existed a few decades prior."
"The country with the highest prevalence of diabetes is now not the U.S. or Britain, but Pakistan. The countries with the highest rates of obesity are the impoverished statelets of the South Pacific, like Nauru and Tonga, which now neglect nutrient-rich local staples like coconut or breadfruit in favor of processed foods imported from Australia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Even the Yucatec Mayans of southern Mexico have begun to suffer greatly from Western lifestyle diseases."
"Microbiome depletion is likely linked to the growth in mental disorders over the last few decades: researchers have increasingly focused on the “gut-brain axis” and its relationship to mental health. There is substantial evidence that the remarkable increase in depression and anxiety over the last few decades might not just be a product of loosening interpersonal bonds, but also a reverberation of these widespread physiological problems. Common deficiencies in minerals like magnesium, for instance, have been linked to depression and anxiety in women; a number of studies have found a connection between low intakes of Omega-3 fatty acids and depression and bipolar disorder, on both the individual and population levels."
"The simple fact that whole, organic food is expensive creates a class divide in health that is severe enough to be visible in the geography of American cities: the disparity in life expectancy between the Roxbury and Beacon Hill neighborhoods of Boston, for instance, is now about as large as the gap between El Salvador and Finland—with the poorest sub-neighborhoods of Roxbury, like Egleston Square, reporting life expectancies lower than those of Haiti or Liberia."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Monday, June 13th, 2022
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12:09
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Regular caffeine consumption affects brain structure
"Data comparison revealed that the participants' depth of sleep was equal, regardless of whether they had taken the caffeine or the placebo capsules. But they saw a significant difference in the gray matter, depending on whether the subject had received caffeine or the placebo. After 10 days of placebo -- i.e. "caffeine abstinence" -- the volume of gray matter was greater than following the same period of time with caffeine capsules. ..
Although caffeine appears to reduce the volume of gray matter, after just 10 days of coffee abstinence it had significantly regenerated in the test subjects."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Monday, May 30th, 2022
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14:00
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| Friday, May 27th, 2022
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12:54 - Jacques of S'T'A - Life in Mobile Phone
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12:42
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The Life of a Backpacker in Asia in the 1970s
"I was shooting two rolls of film a day while traveling, about 70 photos. When I was growing up, my family would shoot a roll of 24 photos in a year, which was pretty typical. You'd have three holidays on one roll. It was considered radical, extreme to be shooting as many photos as I was. When I would tell people I shot 70 per day their jaws would drop. They couldn't imagine how you could find 70 things to take a photo of in one day! That many pictures in a day was considered insane."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Thursday, May 12th, 2022
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17:34
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"De Valk windmill in mourning position following the death of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands in 1962"
"In the Netherlands, the stationary position of the sails, i.e. when the mill is not working, has long been used to give signals. If the blades are stopped in a "+" sign (3-6-9-12 o'clock), the windmill is open for business. When the blades are stopped in an "X" configuration, the windmill is closed or not functional. A slight tilt of the sails (top blade at 1 o'clock) signals joy, such as the birth of a healthy baby. A tilt of the blades to 11-2-5-8 o'clock signals mourning, or warning. It was used to signal the local region during Nazi operations in World War II, such as searches for Jews. Across the Netherlands, windmills were placed in mourning position in honor of the Dutch victims of the 2014 Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 shootdown."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Sunday, April 24th, 2022
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19:44
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19:40
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Windows to the Soul: Pupils Reveal ‘Aphantasia’ – The Absence of Visual Imagination
"Exposing participants to bright and dark shapes, the researchers found that aphantasic individuals exhibited the same pupillary response as the general population: constriction to bright, dilation to dark.
However, during the study’s second component where participants were asked to visualise those same shapes, the pupillary response of aphantasic individuals did not significantly differ in response to imagined dark versus imagined bright objects.
“One of the problems with many existing methods to measure imagery is that they are subjective, that is to say they rely on people being able to accurately assess their own imagery. Our results show an exciting new objective method to measure visual imagery,” says Prof Pearson, “and the first physiological evidence of aphantasia. With over 1.3 million Australians thought to have aphantasia, and 400 million more internationally, we are now close to an objective physiological test, like a blood test, to see if someone truly has it.”
To ensure the aphantasic participants were really attempting imagery, the researchers included a further experimental condition, requesting aphantasic individuals to visualise four shapes, instead of one.
While the pupils of those with aphantasia showed no difference when imagining light versus dark objects, they did show a difference imagining one versus four objects, suggesting more mental effort, thereby negating an explanation of non-participation by aphantasic individuals."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Tuesday, March 29th, 2022
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08:58
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Best occupational name ever?
"It is delightful enough that Dr. Icecreamwala exists, but the story gets better. Icecreamwala is her married name. She was born Devika Patel. Some people might have stuck with Patel, preferring the common and nondescript to the rare and wonderful. Not Dr. Icecreamwala! She not only changed her name, she embraced the new one. Her practice is called Icecreamwala Dermatology and their internet domain is icecreamderm.com.
Ozy Brennan recently considered the problem of which parent's surnames to give to the children. and suggested that they choose whichever is coolest. Dr. Icecreamwala appears to be in agreement."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Thursday, March 10th, 2022
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09:40
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| Tuesday, March 8th, 2022
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12:57 - Pirmie iespaidi par Elden Ring
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| Wednesday, February 23rd, 2022
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13:45
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| Friday, February 11th, 2022
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12:38 - Magdalena Bay
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| Wednesday, February 9th, 2022
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10:21
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How Wine Bricks Saved The U.S. Wine Industry During Prohibition
"If you were to purchase one of these bricks, on the package would be a note explaining how to dissolve the concentrate in a gallon of water. Then right below it, the note would continue with a warning instructing you not to leave that jug in the cool cupboard for 21 days, or it would turn into wine. That warning was in fact your key to vino, and thanks to loopholes in Prohibition legislation, consuming 200 gallons of this homemade wine for your personal use was completely legal, it just couldn’t leave your home – something wine brick packages were also very careful to remind consumers. Besides the “warning,” wine brick makers such as Vino Sano were very open about what they knew their product was to be used for, even including the flavors – such as Burgundy, Claret and Riesling – one might encounter if they mistakenly left the juice to ferment."
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(1 comment | ir ko piebilst)
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| Sunday, January 23rd, 2022
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21:51
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15:44
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The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle
"Unsurprisingly, there’s little – or actually no – academic research into the energy savings potential of hot water bottles. Instead, in recent years scientists have investigated more sophisticated personal heating devices such as electrically heated desks and seats, radiant heat bulbs, or battery-powered heat pillows.
These alternatives look needlessly complex in comparison to the hot water bottle. .. Nevertheless, these studies show that personal heating sources with similar effects as hot water bottles could save a great deal of energy while maintaining and often even improving thermal comfort. For example, one study revealed that lowering the air temperature in an office from 20.5°C to 18.8°C and giving employees a heated chair to compensate for the discomfort leads to 35% less energy use and consistently higher scores for thermal comfort."
".. the average household energy use for gas heating in Belgium – which has a moderate climate – is 20,000 kWh per year. Assuming that the average Belgian heating system is used for six months per year, daily energy use corresponds to 109.6 kWh per day. This energy could heat roughly 900 water bottles per day – enough to keep the whole neighbourhood comfortable.
Imagine that four household members each use two hot water bottles simultaneously and reheat them every two hours throughout their waking hours (16 hours). Total energy use is then below 4 kilowatt-hours, almost 30 times less than the heating energy consumed by the average Belgian household."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Friday, December 31st, 2021
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17:29
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The curious history of the clothespeg
"By the early 20th century the equivalent of 500,000 board-feet of lumber (perhaps 700 tonnes) a year, in the form of sawmill waste, were being pulled from the Green Mountains to make pegs at a rate of more than 20,000 a day. The Smith-Moore peg is a triumph of design, equally pleasing when mini (to clip a sprig of lavender to a martini glass, or a favour to a wedding menu) or when maxi, as in Claes Oldenburg’s 14-metre-high steel “Clothespin” in Philadelphia. In 150 years, this item has not been improved on. .. In 2009 the last domestic peg clittered off the production line, and the last owner of the National Clothespin Company was buried under a five-foot reclining version, in grey granite, that looked as dead as he was.
Odd then, but true, that at the same moment, in various places, sales of pegs began to soar. In 2007 Asda, a supermarket chain, reported that British sales had risen by 1,400% in the first four months of the year compared with the year before. Such a spike was mystifying, and a shock. Moreover, plastic pegs (which degraded in sunlight) were losing out to traditional wooden ones. The switch to wood was a by-product of nascent hipster culture, with its love of beards, craft beer, bicycles-with-baskets, milk-rounds and all things retro; the return to pegs, though, seemed part-caused by guilt at the amount of carbon dioxide, 1.5kg, emitted by each cycle of a tumble-drier. The two trends together resulted in a renaissance. Along the back-roads of both New and Old England, smaller companies sprang up again to make thousands of wooden artisan pegs of good hazel and ash."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Monday, December 27th, 2021
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18:00
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