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Some men too fat to see their own penis
LONDON: A shocking 33 percent of 35 to 60-year-olds are so overweight that their manhood is hidden from sight when they stand upright and look downwards, a new study has revealed.
According to the survey of 1,000 men commissioned by WeLoveOurHealth.co.uk, a staggering 44 per cent of those aged between 51 and 60 fail the “spot the penis” test.
Obese men who are unable to see their penises are said to be five times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes and three times more likely to develop colon cancer.
“This new research is really worrying and men must be encouraged to wake up to the potential life-threatening risks of being overweight and to make this vital check,” the Sun newspaper quoted A and E specialist Dr Johan du Plessis, who also works as WeLoveOurHealth.co.uk‘s online doctor, as saying.
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/leisure/2012/09/24/some-men-too-fat-to-see-their-own-penis/
Rush Limbaugh Should volunteer to be the spokesperson of the "spot yer wiener" society...
Wax Filling Was the Cutting Edge of Stone-Age Dentistry
We’re lucky to live in a modern age, an age when, instead of ripping out a painful cavity-ridden tooth, we can have dentists drill away the rotten bit and plug up the hole with a filling. But a new discovery reveals that fillings aren’t just modern conveniences: they date back to the Stone Age. Researchers have discovered that a tooth on a 6500-year-old human jawbone has a large cavity covered by a beeswax cap—making that wax the oldest dental filling ever discovered.
The well-cared-for jaw was discovered in a cave in Slovenia. Radiocarbon dating indicates that both the jawbone and the wax filling come from the Stone Age. And a close examination of the teeth shows that the left canine has worn enamel, a vertical crack, and a beeswax cap that partially fills the cavity.
While the beeswax may have been applied as a coating before the crack opened, or placed after death as part of a funeral ritual, the researchers think it was a filling. It looks like the cavity formed before the wax’s application, and it seems odd that a funeral ritual would have targeted a single tooth—no wax was placed on the other teeth, even those with some damage. This particular crack would have been a nasty, painful cavity, and the beeswax probably soothed the pain and insulated the damaged tooth from temperature changes and contact with food. Today’s fillings serve a similar purpose—but we drill a cavity before filling it in order to remove the decayed part of the tooth. For that kind of technology, our 6500-year-old friend would have to…go back another 2500 years.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/09/21/wax-filling-was-the-cutting-edge-of-stone-age-dentistry/
Are Biologists Watching an Evolutionary Leap: One Life Form Absorbing Another?
More than 1.6 billion years ago, one cell engulfed another and put it to work. More specifically, a eukaryotic cell, the sort of cell that contains distinct structures with different functions, took in a blue-green bacterium that could do something it could not: use sunlight to make sugars. The ancient eukaryote then reproduced the bacterium in all of its cells, making it a permanent part of the intracellular environment. What was once an independent microbe was now the chloroplast: the cellular structure, or organelle, that plant cells use to photosynthesize. They’ve been together ever since, an absorption known as endosymbiosis.
Nor, scientists think, were chloroplasts the only parts of cells that were once bacteria: Mitochondria, organelles that produce energy in plant and animal cells, got their start the same way, and some other organelles may have, as well. Now researchers have found another useful bacterium that they think is on its way to becoming a modern organelle of another eukaryotic cell—this time, an alga rather than a plant or animal. Studying this relationship would allow scientists to witness endosymbiosis in action, something they had long theorized but never seen.
The alga and the bacterium met in the ocean, and forged a relationship based on nutrient exchange, researchers report in Science. The alga draws energy from sunlight and produces sugars, which the bacterium uses as fuel. In return, the bacterium processes nitrogen gas into ammonium, which the alga needs. This transfer can occur because the bacterium and the alga live close together, as the scientists know through microscopy and by the fact that the two cell types stayed together during a cell sorting experiment.
In the future, scientists predict, the two will be inseparable; the alga will engulf the bacterium, the bacterium will lose its individual identity and, instead, live as an organelle within the algal cell. The rest will be history.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/09/22/are-biologists-watching-an-evolutionary-leap-one-life-form-absorbing-another/
Automatic 3-D Moon
Korolev lobate scarp on the Moon, in 3-D. Lobate scarps, a type of cliff,are found mostly in the highlands on the Moon, and are relatively small and young. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.
Who doesn’t love 3-D images, especially of objects in space? But creating them can be a bit time-consuming for scientists, especially for images from orbiting spacecraft like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that takes images from just one angle at a time. Usually, it is “amateur” enthusiasts who take the time to find and combine images from different orbital passes to create rich, 3-D views.
But now, scientists at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University have developed a new automatic “brain” — a new automatic processing system that aligns and adjusts images from LRO, and combines them into images that can be viewed using standard red-cyan 3D glasses.
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/97554/a-new-automatic-3-d-moon/
Milky Way Surrounded By Humongous Halo Of Hot Gas
CARL FRANZEN SEPTEMBER 24, 2012, 5:00 PM 3064
Scientists using NASA’s orbital X-ray space telescope Chandra have discovered that our own Milky Way Galaxy has a massive halo of superheated gas surrounding it, the agency announced on Monday.
It’s difficult to conceive of just how large the hot gas halo is, but NASA notes it could extend more than 300,000 light years out from its center, and have a mass equivalent between 10 billion suns and 60 billion suns, or just as many or more than all of the stars in the Milky Way itself, at a temperature “a few hundred times hotter” than the surface of our Sun (between 1 million and 2.5 million kelvin).
The hot gas halo could also help solve the great cosmic mystery of the missing baryons, or particles including protons and neutrons which ancient galaxies have in abundance and which are thought to have composed a sixth of the matter at the universe’s dawn, but which are found in about half that amount in our galaxy and its neighbors.
The newly discovered gas halo itself could be where the baryons have ended up during the course of the universe’s evolution.
more
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/milky-way-surrounded-by-humongous-halo-of-hot-gas.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
I never knew Clear Channel reached so far away!
NFL Replacement Referees Have Compromised The Game's Integrity
If you want to see the twenty-eight worst mistakes that NFL replacement referees made during Week 2, sports commentary website Deadspin has the breakdown. If there is interest in reading about all of the blunders in real time, just do a Twitter search of “replacement ref” and follow the myriad of tweets attacking the replacement referees’ decisions (or general indecision, which has been criticized for slowing down NFL games). A player slipped on a referee’s thrown hat in the end zone, a referee reportedly told Philadelphia Eagles running back LeSean McCoy that he needed him to perform well for his fantasy football team, and multiple referees appear to be having trouble remembering how many timeouts remain for various teams.
The result of constant replacement referee missteps is an abundance of questions asking whether the integrity of the NFL game is in serious jeopardy. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines integrity as “firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values.” For a league that has been hell-bent to prevent the demise of its product, its hard-line approach in the ongoing negotiations with the NFL Referees Association is apocryphal.
The NFL is currently a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the State of New Jersey’s Governor, Assistant Attorney General, and Executive Director of the New Jersey Racing Commission, which seeks to prevent the state of New Jersey from establishing a sports gambling system. In 2009, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell explained that “NFL owners and players have worked hard from the league’s inception nearly 90 years ago to protect its integrity,” and thus, the NFL has taken the position that gambling on NFL games should be prohibited. Goodell’s stance has not changed since he first expressed that opinion.
Has the imposition of replacement referees compromised the character and integrity of NFL football? Arguably, the character and integrity of NFL football has been damaged (at least temporarily). Further, Roger Goodell’s stance on sports betting has become almost disingenuous. How can he claim that the spread of sports betting (which is completely legal in Nevada) threatens to irreparably damage the integrity of NFL football while he continues to employ replacement referees that are unjustly affecting the outcome of NFL games? If Goodell’s most important responsibility is maintaining integrity, then he has some explaining to do. The National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) agrees.
more
http://www.forbes.com/sites/darrenheitner/2012/09/23/nfls-replacement-referees-have-compromised-the-games-integrity-and-leagues-position-on-sports-betting/
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