Are you breathing now?
These are the first three things you most likely do when you turn on the computer: you check your email, you reply to some and then, you stop breathing. Yes. Just like most people around, you hold your breath or breath very shallowly, especially when responding to emails.
This modern (and certainly bizarre) diagnosis is called email apnea, a temporary absence or suspension of breathing or shallow breathing, while doing email. Read more
Filed Under Media & Society, Modern Life, Research
Elephants and Africa: love and hate
These days there’s a big discussion going on about elephants in South Africa. The government ended the moratorium on the culling of elephants in the Kruger National Park because of overpopulation. But on Thursday the Earth Organisation said that there is no scientific evidence to demonstrate that the animals are affecting the biodiversity of that area.
While these factions are arguing, in Kenia, where elephants usually damage crop and threaten human life, scientists have been working with farmers to test elephant deterrents and empowering community groups to better cope with elephant crop raiding. Researchers have come up with oil-chilli-tobacco ropes, fireworks, air pressure horns, bees, and early warning systems such as trip wires and observation towers. Here where crop’s damage by elephants is considered a major cause of depletion of food, wildlife is a tourist attraction and cohabitation between humans and elephants is necessary.
Filed Under Environment
Can a straw change the world?
The most prolific killer of human beings in developed countries is the automobile, followed by a host of diseases resulting mainly from an indulgent lifestyle.
As we are sitting at our desks, staring at the computer and drinking some diet soft drinks (because your partner said you’re getting fat) we forget that millions of people perish every year because they simply don’t have clean water to drink!
Could the last Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas’ winner solve this problem?
Read more
Filed Under Environment, Food, Human Rights, Modern Life, Technology, Water
Show me your hair and I’ll tell you… where you have been
As privacy was not enough hard to maintain today! People can find out where you are about by observing your mobile, your credit card and the highways you’re driving on.
Now the water you’ve drunk can reveal the places you’ve visited by leaving traces in your hair!
Filed Under Food, Modern Life, Water, Wondering
Eskimos sue big companies for climate change
Everyone is worried about climate change, but now someone in Alaska is getting really angry!
Kivalina, a tiny village (390 residents) on a barrier reef in the Arctic Ocean, has filed suit against 24 major oil and gas companies for damages due to global warming.
Over the past few years the village has been exposed to storms and erosion as a result of melting sea ice. Do greenhouse gas emissions from the companies help warm the atmosphere and melt sea ice? Yes they do, according to Eskimo residents.
Filed Under Environment, World Health
30-days-sex therapy to save your marriage
Imagine it’s Sunday. You don’t have to go to the office. You are still in bed. You could wake up at 12 but your wife is in a hurry because you have to take your children to church.
So you dress up, you take the kids on your car and you’re ready to listen to the usual, peaceful, warning, every-sunday sermon the priest has made you used to. Thinking to your wife pushing you out of your sheets you realize your marriage doesn’t work anymore.
You’re bored and sad, and then you hear your priest’ s challange: “Have sex for 30 days to save your marriage!”.
Read more
Filed Under Events, Modern Life
Gays the cause of earthquakes?
Wikipedia says that an earthquake is the result of a sudden release of energy in the Earth’s crust, but a Member of Knesset (Israeli parliament), has a different opinion; he believes that this seismic phenomenon is caused by homosexuality. Read more
Filed Under Diversity, Events, Media & Society