Common Chemicals Are Damaging Genitals And The Ability To Father Offspring, Says Research

Two-thirds of male Sitka black-tailed deer in Alaska have been found to have undescended testes and deformed antler growth, and roughly the same proportion of white-tailed deer in Montana were discovered to have genital abnormalities.

In South Africa, eland have been revealed to have damaged testicles while being contaminated by high levels of gender-bender chemicals, and striped mice from one polluted nature reserved were discovered to be producing no sperm at all. AGENCIES

(Source: The Times of India) 

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new Nasa satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.
More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by Nasa’s GRACE satellite, said geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

Nasa scientists planned to present their findings on Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Luthcke said Greenland figures for the summer of 2008 aren’t complete yet, but this year’s ice loss, while still significant, won’t be as severe as 2007. Since 2003, when the Nasa satellite started taking measurements, Alaska has lost 400 billion tons of land ice.

Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels very slightly. In the 1990s, Greenland didn’t add to world sea level rise; now that island is adding about half a
millimetre of sea level rise a year,
Nasa ice scientist Jay Zwally said. Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice
has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms. Other research, being presented this week at the geophysical meeting point to more melting concerns from global warming, especially with sea ice.

Scientists studying sea ice are going to announce that parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 to 10 degrees warmer this past fall, a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That’s when the Arctic warms faster than predicted, and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere on the globe.

As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of white ice. That absorbed heat is released into the air in the fall. That has led to autumn temperatures in the last several years that are six to 10 degrees warmer than they were in the 1980s, said research scientist Julienne Stroeve at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. That’s a strong and early impact of global warming, she said.

(Source: The Times Of India)

46% Women Ready To Forego Sex For 2 Weeks Instead Of Giving Up Net Access: Poll

Amajor software giant came up with a novel way to show how important the internet and  computing have become in the lives of Americans. Intel, in conjunction with Harris Interactive, the company conducted a survey of adults in the United States under the prosaic-enough banner “Internet Reliance in Today’s Economy”.

But the first “key finding” from the study is a little more attention-grabbing. According to the study, 46% of women and 30% of men would opt to forgo sex for two weeks instead of giving up access to their precious internet for the same period.

More broadly, those surveyed said access to the internet ranked highest among the discretionary spending items they could not live without. Cable television, dining out, shopping for clothes and gym memberships followed in declining importance.
Along similar lines, 61% of the women surveyed said they would rather go without TV for two weeks than lose access to the internet for one week.

Using the data as a means of pitching products fueled by Intel chips, the company said: “The survey revealed that 65% of adults feel they cannot live without internet access, and even more — 71% — responded that it is important or very important to have internetenabled devices, such as laptops, netbooks and mobile internet devices that can provide them with real-time updates on important issues including the state of the economy.”

On Intel’s account, Harris Interactive questioned 2,119 people last month. 49% of the women aged between 18 and 34 years old answered that they wouldn’t prefer sex to internet and 52% of the women aged 35 to 44 said they would chose Internet to sex too.

The people questioned by Harris Interactive are exactly the people who sign up for their sites and Intel’s goal was to show how important and reliable is the Internet during the economic crisis.

(Source: The Times of India)

 Women often crib that some men prefer soccer to sex. Now, a new study has finally found the reason — for blokes, watching their home team score is like indulging in carnal pleasures. Researchers have found that when football lovers watch their team scoring goals, an immediate activity triggers in the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, an area associated with intense pleasure and sexual arousal.

According to lead researcher John McLean at Institute of Neurological Sciences, Southern General Hospital, Glasgow, “Our main aim was to exploit the passion that some people have for sport and capture the acute and intensely pleasurable feeling experienced by supporters when a goal is scored.

“Our results show the part of the brain associated with intense pleasure, and which has been associated with arousal, is most active at the time a goal is scored, compared to other times.”

In the study, being reported in the journal Psychiatry Research Neuroimaging this week, researchers used brain scanning equipment on nine fervant Glasgow Rangers fans, all season ticket holders or former season ticket holders, while they watched a series of video clips of goals scored by their team. Each of the 30 clips was four second long, to avoid boredom setting in, with three seconds of build up followed by the goal, the Daily Telegraph reported.

For comparison, scans were also taken when the men were watching 30 clips where a goal was missed, and 52 which showed open play away from the goal. No sound was included in any of the clips.
Results show that activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of the brain was substantially higher when a goal was scored than when chances were missed and in open play.

Other research has found that the ACC is also highly active at times of intense pleasure. One study investigating sexual stimulation in men and women found that the ACC was one of the brain areas involved with arousal in both sexes.

“This pleasure stimulus might evoke responses similar in nature to that of goals being scored. This study has measured the response of ardent soccer fans to goals and it is clear that this is a particularly strong emotional stimulus. Whether it is as powerful a stimulus as sex, I don’t know; perhaps for some people. It might be difficult, however, to do a study with people having sex in a scanner,” McLean was quoted as saying.

(Source: The Times of India)