Hands allude to a personÕs age.

Fidgety, ink-stained and with nails bitten to the quick, Gordon Brown’s hands are fast becoming a visible symbol of the pressures he is under.
“Since he became prime minister, Gordon Brown looks cared for above the eyebrows --he has had a decent haircut“. That’s the pithy verdict of Veronique Henderson, co-author of Style Matters for Men, BBC reported.
“But nobody has told him about his hands. His stained fingers say: here is a man that does not look after himself, and who does not care about his image. And he is chewing on his nails--a sign of a nervous and worried disposition.“
It’s not only stylists who see significance in hands. Experts from fields as diverse as palmistry and biology say it’s the hands--not the eyes--that provide the most revealing insights into a person’s character.
As far as occupations go, common sense tells us that a writer or an office worker is likely to have soft hands, while the expression “horny-handed son of toil“ aptly reflects the damage done by manual labor.
To the great detective, Sherlock Holmes, such a theory was elementary. “By a persons’ fingernails... by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb... by each of these things an individual’s calling is revealed.“
It was a lesson learned well by the Khmer Rouge, which ruled Cambodia during the 1970s. In a bid to root out individual thinkers, Pol Pot’s soldiers would routinely examine people’s hands. Those with soft palms were deemed “intellectuals“ and dispatched to the Killing Fields.
Yet hands also allude to a person’s age. A study by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons found that most people who were shown photographs of a female hand were able to accurately estimate the subject’s age.

Revealing Insights
while a person’s hands may indicate their age or occupation, practitioners of chiromancy--or palmistry--believe the appearance of a person’s hands can offer more revealing insights.
Palmist Paul Hughes Barlow, who practices beneath Brighton pier under the name Punditt Maharaj, says the shape of the hand, the lines that run across it and the way the fingers are held all indicate a specific personality; even a person’s future.
“The hand is something you use to express yourself--the inside of the hand is secret and reveals a lot of what you think and feel,“ he says.

Hormone levels
Whilst many scientists are dismissive of palmistry, they do believe that the shape of the hand, or more specifically the relative size of the index and ring fingers, can provide accurate information about an individual.
Research by Professor John Manning, author of The Finger Book, suggests those with a long ring finger compared to their index finger are more likely to excel at sporting activities. Those with larger index fingers are more likely to be sociable.
“It is all to do with the amount of the hormones testosterone and estrogen produced by the fetus while it is in the womb,“ he says. “More testosterone is indicated by a relatively large ring finger. More estrogen shows up as a longer index finger.“

Getting clean water to survivors of a disaster is far more important than disposing of the dead, but myths persist that corpses somehow spread disease, the World Health Organization said.
The UN health agency issued a statement after learning that Chinese rescue teams were distributing disinfectant to spray on the bodies of those who died in Monday’s earthquake in southern China, which has killed 15,000 people, Reuters reported.
Similar concerns were expressed in Myanmar, where more than 130,000 people are dead or missing after Cyclone Nargis hit on May 2.
WHO advised rescuers to focus on the living, not the dead, and to pay special attention to the old, the very young and the sick.
“There is a widespread and erroneous belief that dead bodies are a source of disease and therefore a threat to public health. This is untrue,“ WHO said in a statement.
“There is no public health threat from dead bodies and this misapprehension causes unnecessary diversion of staff and resources at a critical time. Pressure from misinformed journalists and media organizations can cause governments to behave inappropriately, for example spraying the area around dead bodies with disinfectant or covering dead bodies with lime,“ WHO added in the advisory.
“There has never been a documented case of a post-natural-disaster epidemic that could be traced to dead bodies. Those killed by natural disasters are generally healthy at the time of their death, and therefore very unlikely to be a source of infection to others.“
WHO said epidemics are more likely to come from unsafe food and dirty water.