Nasal spray of hormone used to induce labor can dramatically improve sexual performance in men…
It is the chemical that has been described by women as a “cuddle drug”. Now scientists have discovered that its effect on men is more rampant and long-lasting than just the desire for a quick hug.
Oxytocin, a hormone traditionally used to induce labour, is as sexually arousing to men as Viagra, according to new research.
Studies conducted in the US found that a married man who sniffed a nasal spray containing oxytocin twice daily became more affectionate to friends and colleagues and recorded a marked improvement in his sexual performance.
According to the actual breakdown of results, the man’s libido went from “weak to strong”, while arousal went from “difficult to easy”. Ego certainly wasn’t hurt either: sexual performance, according to feedback from his wife, was classed as “very satisfying”.
Scientists at the University of California believe the findings provide strong support for the idea that oxytocin improves sexual performance and, unlike Viagra, remains a chemical glue within the brain to cement relationships between people. Just how it works is not clear, but some studies have suggested that oxytocin levels rise naturally during arousal. The hormone is also thought to interact with the dopamine system, which is involved in the rewarding aspects of sexual activity.
Read HERE.
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LIFE – Your World in Pictures “LIFE.com represents the most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web. With over 10 million photos from the legendary archives of LIFE magazine and thousands more added every day.”
The term ‘marriage’ derives from the Latin word mas meaning ‘male’ or ‘masculine.’ The earliest known use of the word in English dates from the thirteenth century. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Letter from a farm kid, now a Marine Corps recruit
Dear Ma and Pa,
I am well. Hope you are. Tell Brother Walt and Brother Elmer the Marine Corps beats working for old man Minch by a mile. Tell them to join up quick before all of the places are filled.
I was restless at first because you got to stay in bed till nearly 6 a.m. but I am getting so I like to sleep late. Tell Walt and Elmer all you do before breakfast is smooth your cot, and shine some things. No hogs to slop, feed to pitch, mash to mix, wood to split, fire to lay. Practically nothing.
Men got to shave but it is not so bad, there’s warm water. Breakfast is strong on trimmings like fruit juice, cereal, eggs, bacon, etc. but kind of weak on chops, potatoes, ham, steak, fried eggplant, pie and other regular food, but tell Walt and Elmer you can always sit by the two city boys that live on coffee. Their food plus yours holds you til noon when you get fed again.
It’s no wonder these city boys can’t walk much. We go on “route marches”, which the platoon sergeant says are long walks to harden us. If he thinks so, it’s not my place to tell him different. A “route march” is about as far as to our mailbox at home. Then the city guys get sore feet and we all ride back in trucks.
The country is nice but awful flat The sergeant is like a school teacher. He nags a lot. The Captain is like the school board. Majors and colonels just ride around and frown. They don’t bother you none.
This next will kill Walt and Elmer with laughing. I keep getting medals for shooting. I don’t know why. The bulls-eye is near as big as a chipmunk head and don’t move, and it ain’t shooting at you like the Higgett boys at home. All you got to do is lie there all comfortable and hit it. You don’t even load your own cartridges. They come in boxes.
Then we have what they call hand-to-hand combat training. You get to wrestle with them city boys. I have to be real careful though, they break real easy. It ain’t like fighting with that ole bull at home. I’m about the best they got in this except for that Tug Jordan from over in Silver Lake. I only beat him once. He joined up the same time as me, but I’m only 5’6″ and 130 pounds and he’s 6’8″ and near 300 pounds dry.
Be sure to tell Walt and Elmer to hurry and join before other fellers get onto this setup and come stampeding in.
Your loving daughter, Gail
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Last known photo of the Titanic, 1912.
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Arguably , the Founding Fathers of the American Republic aside, no other single name has affected the imagination and the parlance of the latter generations more than that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, the name today carries with it so much gravitas, symbolism and power that it’s hard to believe that when he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was only 39 and had only been on national consciousness for only 13 short, albeit turbulent and transformative, years.
It’s also hard to believe that King’s popularity was already declining before that fateful April morning, and the charismatic preacher himself was a tired man. Negative ratings for him gradually increased since 1964, and in 1967, for the first time in almost a decade, King’s name was left off the Gallup-poll list of the 10 most admired Americans. His foreign policy initiatives such as trying to mediate in the Nigerian-Biafran War were not well-received; supports from his financial backers, universities and publishers were dwindling.
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1880s Statue of Liberty being made in Paris
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The American Civil War Ends at Appomattox Court House (This day in 1865)
The first major engagement of the US Civil War was the First Battle of Bull Run, fought in 1861 partly on the farm of Wilmer McLean in Manassas, Virginia. A few years later, McLean moved to Appomattox Court House, a town which, coincidentally, would soon be the site of the war’s effective end. It was there that Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in McLean’s parlor. Why did Grant stop Union troops when they began to celebrate the victory? More…
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Powdered Rhino Horn More Costly than Cocaine
In Vietnam, rhinoceros horn is selling for more than cocaine, driving up poaching rates considerably. At $25,000 a pound, powdered rhino horn is in high demand for its purported, yet unsubstantiated, medicinal properties, such as being able to cure cancer. The substance is now more costly than other exotic animal products used in traditional medicine, like bear bile and tiger bone paste. Vietnam’s last known Javan rhinoceros was killed by poachers in 2010, and demand for the horn is now so great that experts worry the world’s remaining rhino populations could soon meet the same fate. More …
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More than three years ago, the CIA dispatched a stealth surveillance drone into the skies over Iran.
The bat-winged aircraft penetrated more than 600 miles inside the country, captured images of Iran’s secret nuclear facility at Qom and then flew home. All the while, analysts at the CIA and other agencies watched carefully for any sign that the craft, dubbed the RQ-170 Sentinel, had been detected by Tehran’s air defenses on its maiden voyage.
“There was never even a ripple,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official involved in the previously undisclosed mission.
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A so called religious “Revolutionary Suicide.” The Jonestown Massacre. Almost a thousand bodies litter the jungle compound. November 18, 1978. Guyana, South America
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To the biologist Edward O. Wilson, the Metropolitan Museum of Art encapsulates some of the conflicting impulses natural selection has instilled in humans: the innate drive for expression that spurs some of us to make art, the selfishness that motivates others to earn the riches needed to collect it, and the altruism that compels the donation of collections for the public good — as long as the donors’ names are inscribed on the walls too.
But asked to imagine the museum from the perspective of ants, whose intricate social world he has built a towering reputation by studying, Dr. Wilson painted a scene that was less a lesson in evolution than a chaotic free-for-all.
“To them the crowds would just be a flank-to-flank herd of enormous elephants you have to dodge around,” he said with a boyish giggle from the museum’s teeming steps during a recent visit to New York to promote his 27th book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” which is being published Monday by Liveright. “I don’t think ants would have any aesthetic or intellectual interest in the museum, though they would certainly find a happy home in Central Park.”
An ant’s-eye view of an art museum may seem odd. But Dr. Wilson, 82, has made a grand scientific and literary career by bringing Homo sapiens and the natural world we emerged from closer together, uniting phenomena great and small under the grand perspective of evolution. “Human history makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology,” he said, echoing a line from the new book, which offers a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere, rounded out with broad reflections on art, ethics, language and religion.
MORE.
and another review
HERE
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An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: “Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’ It is, in some measure, the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration — an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.”
Innocent Or Not, the NSA Is Watching You – Slashdot.
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New research by UCLA life scientists could lead to predictions of which plant species will escape extinction from climate change. Droughts are worsening around the world, posing a great challenge to plants in all ecosystems, said Lawren Sack, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the research. Scientists have debated for more than a century how to predict which species are most vulnerable.
Sack and two members of his laboratory have made a fundamental discovery that resolves this debate and allows for the prediction of how diverse plant species and vegetation types worldwide will tolerate drought, which is critical given the threats posed by climate change, he said.
The research is currently available in the online edition of Ecology Letters, and will be published in an upcoming print edition.
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Cyber War (attacks on computer networks, usually via the Internet) requires ammunition, and the most common form of ammo is “Zero Day Exploits” (ZDEs). These are freshly discovered and exploitable defects in software that runs on the Internet. These flaws enable a hacker to get into other people’s networks and PCs. In the right hands these flaws enable criminals to pull off a large online heist or simply maintain secret control over someone’s computer.
ZDEs are rare. They are in great demand and are increasingly expensive to find, or buy, from legitimate researchers or on the hacker black market. The price of ZDEs varies a lot. That’s because not all vulnerabilities are equal. Some are much more valuable than others because they are more effective or allow attacks on a larger number of targets. Commercial Internet security firms offer rewards to people (usually software engineers who spend too much time on the Internet) who first discover a “zero day vulnerability.” These “vulnerabilities” are software bugs that have not yet been put to use by a hacker to create a ZDE. The rewards for really good ZDEs can sometimes exceed a million dollars. The commercial security firms, which provide services for corporate and government clients, offer the rewards openly. There is a more lucrative underground market, financed by criminals and some governments that offer even larger rewards.
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KFAR GVIROL, Israel — While many of the boys in Idan Yahya’s high school class were buffing up and preparing themselves for selection into elite combat units, this gawky teenager was spending “a lot of time” playing Warcraft — the real-time strategy computer game where opposing players command virtual armies in a battle to dominate the fictional world of Azeroth.
Four years later, the high school jocks who sweated it out in pre-military academies so they could make the cut into the Israel Defense Force’s Special Operations units are now crawling through the sand dunes on the outskirts of the Gaza Strip and watching while Idan knocks rockets out of the sky hundreds of meters above their heads. Idan Yahya, 22, an Iron Dome “gunner” in the Active Air Defense Wing 167, currently holds the record for the number of rockets intercepted: eight.
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Evidence of Astronomical Aspects of Mankind’s Past and Recent Climate Homepage
Recurring Phenomenon: The Cosmic Disaster
Besides the most evident cosmic catastrophes ca. 2200 BC and 2345 BC there are other events during the Holocene that are so widely global and difficult to explain by only the Earth’s own mechanisms that a cosmic explanation must evidently be taken into account.
The first so-called “Dark Age”, meaning a period from which little is known despite much information before and after that period, occurred about 3100 BC to 3000 BC. For example in Mesopotamia this period is called Jemdet Nasr. About 3100 BC there was suddenly a change to more primitive ages compared to the preceding Uruk period. For example the numerical token system dwindled. 3000 BC however there was a sudden recovery. This is called the Early Dynasty, which can be described as the first known culture, that began to have some kind of a centralized system. And the tokens were not only numerated again, the basis for writing was born.
What happened 3100 BC, maybe right in 3114 BC? There is not any great crater on the continental areas, but 2/3 of the Earth’s area is covered by water, and flood they speak of. In fact there are two small craters from about this time, but what seems more probable, is a huge meteorite swarm that both caused much damage on land, brought up tsunamis and blanketed with dust the atmosphere. It may have been a break-up of a great comet in the inner parts of the solar system. People were panic-stricken. The beginnings of civilizations, however, got despite of the immediate damage, a first great rise, after about a hundred years had gone. There was a great boomtime. that eventually led to the rise of the first great civilizations in the beginning of the third millennium BC.
What evidence is there then that something immemorable happened around 3100 BC than the Mayan year zero in 3114 BC? Dick Meehan has gathered some happenings around this time:
- Newgrange construction.
- Flood in paleoclimatic data.
- Stonehenge number one (the astronomical one, later versions are religious ones)
- The unification of Egypt as if a cooperation would be needed.
- Methane peak (fires).
- Cold time according to bristlecone pines.
- The coastal menhirs in Brittany.
Although anyone of these in itself would not be of any great concern, the timing of them in a frame of only 100 years, is the thing that makes us suspect that something unusual was going on. And actually beginning, the next 1000 years or so were very restless time globally.
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Part of strengthening a synapse involves making new proteins. Those proteins build the synapse and make it stronger. Just like with exercise, when new proteins must build up muscle mass, synapses must also make more protein when recording memories. In this research, the regulation and control of that process was uncovered.
The production of new proteins can only occur when the RNA that will make the required proteins is turned on. Until then, the RNA is “locked up” by a silencing molecule, which is a micro RNA. The RNA and micro RNA are part of a package that includes several other proteins. “When something comes into your brain –– a thought, some sort of stimulus, you see something interesting, you hear some music –– synapses get activated,” said Kosik. “What happens next is really interesting, but to follow the pathway our experiments moved to cultured neurons. When synapses got activated, one of the proteins wrapped around that silencing complex gets degraded.”
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From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.
It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.
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Federal agencies must report their progress this week in complying with the Plain Writing Act a new decree that government officials communicate more conversationally with the public.
Speaking plainly, they ain’t there yet.
Which leaves, in the eyes of some, a basic and critical flaw in how the country runs. “Government is all about telling people what to do,” said Annetta Cheek, a retired federal worker from Falls Church and longtime evangelist for plain writing. “If you don’t write clearly, they’re not going to do it.”
But advocates such as Cheek estimate that federal officials have translated just 10 percent of their forms, letters, directives and other documents into “clear Government communication that the public can understand and use,” as the law requires.
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The therapy, which targets a molecule found in 90 per cent of all cancers, could provide a universal injection that allows patients’ immune systems to fight off common cancers including breast and prostate cancer.Preliminary results from early clinical trials have shown the vaccine can trigger an immune response in patients and reduce levels of disease.The scientists behind the vaccine now hope to conduct larger trials in patients to prove it can be effective against a range of different cancers.They believe it could be used to combat small tumours if they are detected early enough or to help prevent the return and spread of disease in patients who have undergone other forms of treatment such as surgery.
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On April 15, 1912, John B. “Jack” Thayer III was the 17-year-old heir to a Pennsylvania railroad fortune, riding in first class on the most spectacular ship of its era — the Titanic. He barely survived the disaster, and his account of the night riveted salons in the following decades. Finally, in 1940, he wrote down what happened, printing 500 copies for his family. Five years later, after the tragic loss of his son in WWII, Thayer committed suicide, and his story was mostly forgotten.
Recently, Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, found one of the original copies of Thayer’s book in his family’s library inscribed to his great-grandfather. Now the miraculous account will be printed by New York publisher Thornwillow Press, as a limited edition for the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking (available at thornwillow.com).
Here, an excerpt from Thayer’s story:
Read HERE.
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Over the last few weeks, a number of disparate items converged in my mind. First, in my Petrology and Volcanology class here at Denison, we spent a week talking about what geologists know about triggers for volcanic eruptions. Secondly, I was asked some questions about Richard Branson’s April Fools’ joke regarding the supposed Virgin Volcanic that would send a manned submersible into a volcano. Put these two ideas together, and you get to wondering about that age-old question: Could we trigger a volcano to erupt on purpose? This has been the realm of science fiction and conspiracy theorists for decades (centuries?), the idea that humans could figure out a way to get a volcano that isn’t erupting to start erupting. Mostly, this is in the hands of evil scientists/lunatics who are bent on world domination (paging Dr. Horrible) or some last ditch effort to save the planet (as in Crack in the World).
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