Do you ever feel stressed? It’s a silly question, I know! Modern life brings so many worries and anxieties that you probably feel stressed at least occasionally … and perhaps a lot more often than that.
Whether you’re facing a demanding boss, a difficult colleague, a mountain of debt, a rebellious teen, or a computer that’s crashed and taken all your files with it, stress often seems like an inevitable part of modern life.
For most of us, it’s not a realistic prospect to avoid stressful situations altogether. Instead, we need to find ways to reduce our stress levels on a day-by-day basis, so that we’re better equipped to cope with the inevitable bumps along our path through life.
Here are six simple things that you can do – today, or at least this week – to reduce your stress levels.
#1: Take a Few Deep Breaths
Don’t ignore this because you think it’s too simple. Sitting quietly and taking a few slow, deep breaths can help to reduce stress instantly. (Just try it next time you’re feeling worried or annoyed, and you’ll see how effective it is.)
You might also like to deliberately set aside time in your day to concentrate on your breathing – this is a form of meditation that many people use, and find helpful in reducing stress.
#2: Ask “Will This Matter in a Year?”
If something stresses you out, it can be tough to see whether or not it’s really important in your life. A mini-disaster like losing an important document, or locking yourself out of the house, or getting an angry phone call from a client can feel like a true crisis.
Most things, though, will fade in importance after just a few days or weeks. In a year’s time, will these mini-disasters have any impact on your life? Almost certainly not. By reminding yourself that “this too will pass,” you can avoid some of the anxiety associated with stressful events.
Read it all HERE>
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The Science of a Hangover | The Brain Bank.
As people age, they rely on supernatural more | ScienceBlog.com.
Heavy drinking rewires brain, increasing susceptibility to anxiety problems | e! Science News.
Epigenetics gives clues to human cancer susceptibility – health – 02 September 2012 – New Scientist.
Israeli archeologists find rare stone age figures.
Another Potentially Habitable World Emerges – Science News.
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On precisely this date in 1844, the authors of The Communist Manifesto went on a bender in France. It was epic, and it was epochal, and it is hard to think of a drinking session more significant to the formation of the modern world.
Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were in their 20s at the time, and neither was a drinking novice. Marx first demonstrated talent in the beerhounding field during his first and only year at the University of Bonn. It was, in the understated phrase of his father, a period of “wild rampaging.” As a co-president of his “tavern club,” the lad often tangled with the rival Borussia Korps, which would force him and his bourgeois brethren to kneel in allegiance to the Prussian aristocracy. In hopes of repelling their attacks, Marx started packing a pistol, and a bullet grazed his brow in the duel that inevitably resulted; boys will be boys. He transferred schools, got serious about philosophy, and fell in with the Young Hegelians for a while. To blow off steam while working on his Ph.D., he would knock back pints with Bruno Bauer; they would now and then get smashed and ride donkeys down the main streets of villages.
Engels, meanwhile, had been educating his palate, preparing to become first great champagne socialist. One month-long vacation in the French countryside found young Engels “more or less squiffy all the time,” and his most recent biographer likens his diary of the trip to “an upmarket wine-tour brochure.” (Sample text: “Within a few bottles one can experience every intermediate state from the exultation of the cancan to the tempestuous fever heat of revolution, and then finally with a bottle of champagne one can again drift into the merriest carnival mood in the world!”) An industrialist and a revolutionary, Engels spent two years learning the family business at Ermen and Engels’ Victoria Mill outside of Manchester, England, witnessing the horrors of child labor and gathering material for his first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
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The Evolution of Fairness
A multimedia investigation asks: Can examining how inequality began in a hunter-gatherer society teach us how to fairly share the costs and consequences of how we use diminishing natural resources?
A view of Keatley Creek in British Columbia. House pits that are the focus of archaeological investigations into inequality can be seen at right. (Photo by Alan Honick)
August 31, 2012 • By Alan Honick with Gordon Orians • No Comments and 16 Reactions
In the upper Fraser Canyon, about 250 kilometers northeast of Vancouver, a rocky gorge cuts its way through the interior plateau of British Columbia.
Gordon Orians, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Washington, and I have come here to see evidence of the emergence of inequality in the archaeological record of fishing at a place called Keatley Creek.
Gordon is my science adviser and co-producer on a multimedia project in which we’re investigating the evolution of the human sense of fairness, from its biological roots among the earliest social living animals through its manifestations in the social, economic, and political institutions of today.
Inequality, of course, is not necessarily unfair. Fairness has to do with the process through which it evolves.
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The first woman to run for U.S. president was Victoria Woodhull, who campaigned for the office in 1872 under the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. While women would not be granted the right to vote by a constitutional amendment for nearly 50 years, there were no laws prohibiting a woman from running for the chief executive position. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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When I’m 164: How Can Bioscience Push the Limits of Lifespan?
In 1835, Charles Darwin reached the Galapagos Islands aboard the HMS Beagle. While there, someone (possibly Darwin) captured a tortoise named Harriet. She lived for 176 years, finally dying in 2006.
Other organisms in nature are known to live considerably longer than Harriet. These include the Methuselah tree, a bristlecone pine in Southern California that, at 4,843 years old, is perhaps the oldest known complex organism on Earth. Other creatures that age very slowly and live up to hundreds of years, showing little signs of senescence (aging), include rockfish, clams, lobsters and jellyfish.
Humans, too, live a long time compared to most species. The longest-living primates other than humans are our closest relatives in evolution, chimpanzees. They have an average life span of 53 years. This makes the current life expectancy in the West of nearly 80 years, with a maximum life span of 120 or so. Quite long, though not in the same league as Harriet the tortoise or bristlecone pine trees.
As scientists make new breakthroughs in understanding the mechanics of aging, the upper limits of aging might be changing for Homo sapiens. Already, life expectancy has increased dramatically since the late nineteenth century, when it was 40 for males and 42 for females at birth, and age 58 and 59 respectively if they survived to age 10 (infant mortality was much higher in 1890).
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Study sheds light on lung cancers that are undetected by radiograph.
Respiratory burden ‘high in aging population’.
A new light shed on genetic regulation’s role in the predisposition to common diseases.
Researchers devise simple and cheap method to detect TB in patients.
Prehistoric bugs from 230 million years ago found in amber (Update).
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“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” – Pablo Picasso
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46-Year-Old Indian Mail Bag Found in French Alps
In 1966, Air India Flight 101 crashed on Mont Blanc in the French Alps while en route to New York. All 117 people on board died in the crash, but something survived: a bag of diplomatic mail. The bag was recently retrieved by a mountain rescue worker after it was reported by a group of tourists who spotted it on a glacier. Indian officials say they plan to recover the bag from French authorities.
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Marilyn Monroe standing in a jeep. Korea, 1953.
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FOR THOSE OF YOU CAUGHT UP IN HARRY (PRINCE) AND HIS NAKED LAS VEGAS RAMBLE, READ HERE
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How College Comedies Are Watched by All Ages of Dudes (videos)
“College is the best time of your life,” is something people like to say and believe. It’s also something that self-perpetuates itself: you approach college with that special time of your life vigor and demand nothing less. Accordingly, it’s the college comedy film’s obligation to capture this ethos from all angles: those looking forward to college, those in college, and those looking back at college.
Animal House came out on DVD around the time I was applying for colleges. My dad swiftly purchased it for me with the advice of “you should watch this before you go to college.” I am not unique in this; dads were buying their sons Animal House VHSs for years and will eventually buy them Animal House 3-D blu-rays for years to come. Animal House and other college comedy films can show you what college will be like or, at least, show you what everyone else will think college will be like. They also give you something to look forward to, to study for the SATs for. More specifically they seem to exist to answer one question: Will I get to see boobs in college? And the answer based on every single college comedy is a resounding “Yes!” There are more boobs in these movies than there are blackboards, which is reasonable since the vast majority of college comedies speak much more to the male collegiate ideal than the female. In these movies, women are objects either to be ogled at or won over by the charming protagonist (or if they’re really lucky, they get to be just housewives who stay at home taking blowjob classes). It’s unfortunate; however, these pictures are geared towards the adolescent and the adolescent at heart, and that viewer wants to believe college is the time when they’ll see the most boobs possible. >For those in college it’s less about the aspiration of seeing the boobs, it’s about how will they see boobs. To those inclined, these movies become instructional. For example:
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No more sneezing, allergen-free house plants | e! Science News.
BBC News – Traffic-light blood test shows hidden alcohol harm.
Antibiotic resistance seen growing in soil – UPI.com.
Dinosaur made meals of early birds – UPI.com.
Scientist backs discovery of Higgs boson ‘God particle’ – Science – News – The Independent.
BBC Nature – Birds hold ‘funerals’ for dead.
14 Water Wigs– Awesome Alternatives to Hair Loss Treatment | Hair Loss Geeks.
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Qatar Becomes an Independent State (1971)
Qatar, located on a small peninsula in the Persian Gulf, became a British protectorate in 1916. It remained under British control for more than 50 years, a period during which oil was discovered there and Qatar rapidly modernized. In 1968, Britain declared that it would disengage from the region, and Qatar joined a federation of nearby states. However, disputes arose, and, in 1971, Qatar became an independent state. Prior to the discovery of oil there, Qatar was noted for what unusual industry?
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Actually school in this area, more likely the entire state of Iowa, started up last month.
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Gefreiter Werner Goldberg. Poster boy for the Wehrmacht…
…who was Jewish. In Goebbels opinion young Goldberg was the image of the perfect Aryan and his likeness was used on recruitment posters and such. Inspite of the murderous policies of the Nazis toward the Jews, many Jews were “exempted” from discrimination if they were special in some way the government found rare and indispensible, e.g. some medical specialists and some particularly talented military officers. Or Herr Goldberg with his perfect face. I’m sure all of them found cooperation unsavory, at best. But they were promised that their families would be treated preferentially (a promise kept). Of course, the alternative to cooperation meant death.
Via.
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A knight in digital armour
IT TOOK just 20 minutes to build, but Chris Soghoian’s hastily constructed website capable of generating fake airline boarding passes led to a rebuke from a congressman, a raid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an investigation by the Transport Security Administration (TSA), worldwide media coverage—and ultimate vindication. With a series of similar exploits that have exposed security flaws and privacy violations, he has demonstrated his ability to hack the media with just as much facility as he manipulates computers. At the age of 30 he has established himself as the most prominent member of a new generation of activist technology researchers who delight in causing a media stink in order to shame companies and governments into fixing problems with their systems.
The boarding-pass example occurred in 2006, when Dr Soghoian, then a graduate student at Indiana University, became irritated by an obvious flaw in airport procedures used by TSA screeners. Although screeners checked the name on each passenger’s boarding pass against a government-issued identity document, they had no way of verifying that the boarding pass itself was valid. Fake boarding passes could easily be created for any flight using a computer and image-manipulation software, as had already been pointed out by Bruce Schneier, another security guru, in 2003. Charles Schumer, a senator, even issued a press release in February 2005 explaining how easily security could be bypassed in this way.
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Lost in cyberspace
TRACKING down early web pages can be a problem. The Economist’s first website, for instance, was built by the paper’s California correspondent and went live in March 1994. Eighteen months later, it was reconfigured and brought in-house. All records of the original website were subsequently lost. So much for the idea that the internet never forgets. It does.
There are not even any screen shots of the world’s first web page—the one that actually launched the World Wide Web in August 1991. Type in its address and you will see a modern site that provides details of Tim Berners-Lee’s seminal achievements at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research where he devised the first web browser and server.
Amid the explosive growth of internet services such as e-mail, music downloads and video streaming, along with the growth of the web itself, little thought has been given to recording information for posterity. The rapid turnover of content on the web has made total loss the norm. “Civilisation is developing severe amnesia as a result,” says Stewart Brand of The Long Now Foundation. Danny Hillis, a pioneer of parallel computing and machine intelligence, fears the world has become stuck in a digital dark age, with few cultural artefacts from its digital past to point the way.
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