Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Do you know this?


MESSAGE GOT FROM A MAIL

Do you know this?

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People who ride on roller coasters have a higher chance of having a blood clot in the brain.

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People with blue eyes see better in dark.

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Money isn't made out of paper, it is made out of cotton.

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A tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion will make it go mad instantly and sting itself to death.

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Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

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A huge underground river runs underneath the Nile , with six times more water than the river above.

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The USA uses 29% of the world's petrol and 33% of the world's electricity.

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Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear By 700 times.

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The animal responsible for the most human deaths world-wide is the mosquito.

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Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.

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We exercise at least 30 muscles when we smile.

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Our nose is our personal air-conditioning system: it warms cold air, cools hot air and filters impurities.

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Our brain is more complex than the most powerful computer and has over 100 billion nerve cells.

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When a person dies, hearing is usually the first sense to go.

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There is a great mushroom in Oregon that is 2,400 years old. It Covers 3.4 square miles of land and is still growing.

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German Shepherds bite humans more than any other breed of dog.

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The pupil of the eye expands as much as 45 percent when a person looks at something pleasing

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Men's shirts have the buttons on the right, but women's shirts have the buttons on the left.

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The reason honey is so easy to digest is that it's already been digested by a bee.

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It cost 7 million dollars to build the Titanic and 200 million to make a film about it.

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The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.

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The only part of the body that has no blood supply is the cornea in the eye. It takes in oxygen directly from the air.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

4000-year-old banana roots in Southeast Asia - origin trail

4000-year-old banana roots in Southeast Asia - origin trail

July 17, 2011

4000-year-old banana roots in Southeast Asia - origin trail

G.S. MUDUR

New Delhi, July 16: Scientists have plucked clues from genetics, archaeology and linguistics to reconstruct a history of the domestication of bananas, showing that some of India’s cultivated bananas have 4,000-year old genomic roots from Southeast Asia.

Their studies suggest that the earliest cultivation of bananas was in the Kuk Swamp area of Papua New Guinea about 6,600 years ago, and that bananas were ferried by small groups of people from Southeast Asia moving westward into India and beyond.

A Southeast Asian banana species known as Mlali, a short and yellow variety, was carried from the Indonesian islands into India around 4,000 years ago where its genome is still found in three varieties — Pome, Nendra Padithi and Nadaan, their studies show.

The findings appeared this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It probably arrived 4,000 years ago, give or take a few hundred years. We don’t have enough archaeological data to narrow things down,” said Mark Donohue, a linguist at the Australian National University who was involved in the study.

The researchers combined genetic, archaeological and linguistic information to trace the domestication of the Musa family of bananas, which includes the standard yellow bananas sold around the world. The researchers assumed that any cultivated plant would travel with people along with its name, and when a plant is culturally new, its name would be retained in the places where it had been introduced.

Linguistic data supports the long route of dispersal from Indonesia to India.

Many present-day words for bananas appear to root from the word qarutay that researchers believe had its origins in the Philippines. As the bananas moved, so did their names, slightly tweaked at each new land where it was absorbed.

“Agutay, arutay, kelutay, kalu and the Hindi term kela are all derived from qarutay,” said Xavier Perrier, a systems biologist and research team member at the Centre for Agricultural Research and Development in Montpellier, France. “The word travelled from the Philippines across Vietnam, Thailand and Burma into India,” Perrier told The Telegraph. “This is exactly the route that the Mlali variety took into India,” he said.

“This study confirms that the Indo-China region was the centre of origin of bananas,” said M. Mohamed Mustaffa, the director of India’s National Research Centre for Banana, Tiruchirapalli, who was not associated with the study.

“India has wild bananas native to the northeastern region and some in the Western Ghats, but the bananas cultivated today are products of the crossing of species with part of the genomic makeup coming from Southeast Asian varieties,” Mustaffa said.

Archaeology also supports the westward flow of bananas into South Asia from Southeast Asian islands. Residues of Musa dating back to about 4,000 years have been observed at a site named Kot Diji in Pakistan.

Donohue said the studies also provided clear evidence for movement of people from the east to the west. “We know that the inhabitants of Madagascar are at least in part the descendants of an east-to-west movement about 1,200 years ago,” Donohue told The Telegraph.

“We also have some records of people from Java and Malaysia trading with India about 2,000 years ago,” he said. “It could have been a minor movement in terms of the number of people, but a big transformation in terms of culture.”

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110717/jsp/nation/story_14249961.jsp#

Sunday, June 26, 2011

NUMBERWISE

Observed by Dave Morice in the May 2011 Word Ways:

LUCK requires 7 penstrokes, BLACKJACK 21, FREEZING POINT 32, HOURS IN A DAY 24

· FOUR contains four letters.

· TEN is spelled with ten raised dots in Braille.

· TWELVE is worth 12 points in Scrabble.

· FIFTEEN is spelled with 15 dots and dashes in International Morse Code.

TWENTY-NINE contains 29 straight lines — if you don’t count the hyphen.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

15 Spectacular tricks to teach your body


15 Spectacular tricks to teach your body

1.) If you've got an itch in your throat, scratch your ear. When the nerves in the ear get stimulated, they create a reflex in the throat that causes a muscle spasm, which cures the itch.

2.) Having trouble hearing someone at a party or on the phone? Use your right ear…it's better at picking up rapid speech.. But, the left is better at picking up music tones.

3.) If you need to relieve yourself BADLY, but you're not anywhere near a bathroom, fantasize about RELATIONS. That preoccupies your brain and distracts it..

4.) Next time the doctor's going to give you an injection, COUGH as the needle is going in. The cough raises the level of pressure in your spinal canal, which limits the pain sensation as it tries to travel to your brain..

5.) Clear a stuffed nose or relieve sinus pressure by pushing your
Tongue against the roof of your mouth…then pressing a finger between your eyebrows. Repeat that for 20 seconds…it causes the vomer bone to rock, which loosens your congestion and clears you up.

6.) If you ate a big meal and you're feeling full as you go to sleep, lay on your left side. That'll keep you from suffering from acid reflux…it keeps your stomach lower than your esophagus, which will help keep stomach acid from sliding up your throat.

7.) You can stop a toothache by rubbing ice on the back of your hand, on the webbed area between your thumb and index finger. The nerve pathways there stimulate a part of the brain that blocks pain signals from your mouth.

8.) If you get all messed up on liquor, and the room starts spinning, put your hand on something stable. The reason: Alcohol dilutes the blood in the part of your ear called the cupula, which regulates balance. Putting your hand on something stable gives your brain another reference point, which will help make the world stop spinning.

9.) Stop a nose bleed by putting some cotton on your upper gums…right behind the small dent below your nose…and press against it hard. Most of the bleeding comes from the cartilage wall that divides the nose, so pressing there helps get it to stop.

10.) Nervous? Slow your heart rate down by blowing on your thumb. The vagus nerve controls your heart rate, and you can calm it down by breathing.

11.) Need to breathe underwater for a while??? Instead of taking a huge breath, HYPERVENTILATE before you go under, by taking a bunch of short breaths. That'll trick your brain into thinking it has more oxygen, and buy you about 10 extra seconds.

12.) You can prevent BRAIN FREEZE by pressing your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth, covering as much surface area as possible. Brain freeze happens because the nerves in the roof of your mouth get extremely cold, so your brain thinks your whole body is cold. It compensates by overheating…which causes your head to hurt. By warming up the roof of your mouth, you'll chill your brain and feel better.

13.) If your hand falls asleep, rock your head from side to side.
That'll wake your hand or arm up in less than a minute. Your hand falls asleep because of the nerves in your neck compressing…so loosening your neck is the cure. If your foot falls asleep, that's governed by nerves lower in the body, so you need to stand up and walk around.

14.) Finally, this one's totally USELESS, but a nice trick. Have
Someone stick their arm out to the side, straight, palm down. Press down on his wrist with two fingers. He'll resist, and his arm will stay horizontal. Then, have him put his foot on a surface that's half an inch off the ground, like a stack of magazines, and do the trick again. Because his spine position is thrown off, his arm will fall right to his side, no matter how much he tries to resist.

15.) Got the hiccups? Press thumb and second finger over you
r eyebrows until the hiccups are over usually shortly.