Too Much Sitting Linked To Chronic Health Problems

People who spend hours each day without getting up and moving around should take heed: A new study suggests that the more people sit each day, the greater their risk for chronic health problems, such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Researchers from Australia and Kansas State University said their findings have implications for office workers, truck drivers and other people who regularly sit for long periods of time, HealthDay said.
To reduce the risk of chronic disease, the study authors concluded that people should sit less and move more.
“We know that with very high confidence that more physically active people do better with regard to chronic disease compared with less physically active people, but we should also be looking at reducing sitting,” Richard Rosenkranz, assistant professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, said in a university news release.
“A lot of office jobs that require long periods of sitting may be hazardous to your health because of inactivity and the low levels of energy expenditure,” he added.
The study involved over 63,000 Australian men from New South Wales, ranging in age from 45 to 65. The researchers questioned the men about whether they had chronic diseases and the number of hours they spent sitting down each day.
The study revealed that the men who sat for four hours or less daily were much less likely to have a chronic condition than those who sat for more than four hours each day. And the men who sat for at least six hours daily were at significantly greater risk for diabetes, the researchers noted.

Older Adults Made Less Forgetful

Scientists at Baycrest Health Sciences’ Rotman Research Institute (RRI) and the University of Toronto’s Psychology Department have found compelling evidence that older adults can eliminate forgetfulness and perform as well as younger adults on memory tests.
Scientists used a distraction learning strategy to help older adults overcome age-related forgetting and boost their performance to that of younger adults, ScienceDaily reported.
Distraction learning sounds like an oxymoron, but a growing body of science is showing that older brains are adept at processing irrelevant and relevant information in the environment, without conscious effort, to aid memory performance.
“Older brains may be doing something very adaptive with distraction to compensate for weakening memory,” said Rene Biss, lead investigator and PhD student. “In our study, we asked whether distraction can be used to foster memory-boosting rehearsal for older adults. The answer is yes!”
“To eliminate age-related forgetfulness across three consecutive memory experiments and help older adults perform like younger adults is dramatic and to our knowledge a totally unique finding,” said Lynn Hasher, senior scientist on the study and a leading authority in attention and inhibitory functioning in younger and older adults.
“Poor regulation of attention by older adults may actually have some benefits for memory.”

Economy Seating For 21st Century Airline

Unless you’re lucky enough to fly first- or business-class on a regular basis, you’re probably well-acquainted with the stifling sorrows of the economy cabin: small seats, narrow aisles, not much leg room, and even less shoulder room.
Alireza Yaghoubi certainly was. Yaghoubi is an undergraduate student in Malaysia, where he studies engineering, CSMonitor reported.
About a year ago, he started sketching out plans for a line of new-fangled, endlessly swiveling, ergonomic airline super chairs--replacements for the old-fashioned numbers that were, as he put it, “far from being in sync with today’s technology”.
He called the system AirGo, a play--according to ABC News--on “ergo,” or “ergonomic”.
Had Yaghoubi simply drawn these plans on the back of the napkin, we might never have heard of him or AirGo. But instead, he submitted them to the James Dyson Award Committee, which issues prizes to particularly innovative student engineers around the world.
A few bloggers reported on the AirGo idea, and then a few more, and by early Wednesday, Yaghoubi was on his way to being Internet famous.
In his application, Yaghoubi noted that AirGo was essentially an attempt to democratize the seating process--all passengers, he wrote, have the right to a consistent experience. “No matter what other passengers do, a passenger should receive the very same services he/she was promised,” he said.
He adds: In an AirGo cabin, you have an independent space for your seat and for your carry-on bag as well. The back support is made of flexible, but strong nylon mesh that readily takes the shape of your body to avoid fatigue and additionally prevents sweating.
Unlike older designs, keeping such seats clean is as easy as replacing this recyclable net. A set of 3 motors gives you the ability to customize the seat based on your posture to avoid neck and back pain. Instead of having a footrest on someone else’s seat, the footrest is now part of your seat and can be controlled to maximize comfort.
AirGo seats would only take up 16 percent more space than regular airline seats. An independent touchscreen is on each seat, both as controllers for the various seat functions, and as entertainment hubs.

Bees Get Buzz From Flowers’ Electrical Fields

Everyone knows that bees buzz around flowers in their quest for nectar. But scientists have now learned that flowers are buzzing right back--with electricity.
According to NewScientist, plants generally have a negative electrical charge and emit a weak electrical signal, according to researchers at the University of Bristol in England.
And it’s been known for years that bees’ flapping wings create a positive electrical charge of up to 200 volts as they flit from flower to flower, according to a news release.
But can the bees detect flowers’ electrical charge? While animals like sharks are known to sense electrical fields, nobody has ever found that an insect can also detect electrical fields.

Sensitivity Test
To test the bees’ sensitivity, researchers filled a room with artificial flowers: Half the flowers were electrically charged and carried a sugary reward, while the other half had no charge and a bitter solution of quinine.
The bees quickly learned to visit only the electrically charged flowers, and to not waste their energy visiting flowers with no electrical charge. But when the electrical charges were switched off, the bees once again visited flowers randomly, suggesting that they had been reacting to the electrical charges.
“Animals are just constantly surprising us as to how good their senses are,” Dominic Clarke, lead author of the study (published in Science) told the BBC. “More and more we’re starting to see that nature’s senses are almost as good as they could possibly be.”
Bees and flowers, of course, co-evolved with a long-standing symbiotic relationship: The bees depend on flowers for nectar, which they use to produce honey, and flowers need bees to help pollinate other flowers.
Flowers use other means to attract bees and other pollinators. In addition to their electrical charge and alluring fragrance, flowers display bright colors--and research has found that bees see colors three times faster than humans.

What Makes Tomato Taste Sweet?

Children and adults are evolutionarily ingrained to prefer sweeter foods to bitter ones, scientists have learned. But as it turns out, sugar isn’t the only way to sweeten the pot.
According LiveScience, researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville are searching for new ways to make foods taste better naturally, without adding sugar or artificial sweeteners.
“Flavor equals health. If we can make healthy foods taste better, people will buy more of them and have a healthier diet,” said Harry Klee, a University of Florida plant scientist.
Klee and his colleague Linda Bartoshuk, a psychologist, have found that volatiles--chemicals in fruits and vegetables that create aromas--may play an even more important role than sugar content in a person’s perception of sweetness.
The two discussed their findings last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences in Boston.
“How sweet you think a fruit is isn’t necessarily related to its sugars,” Klee said. For instance, the researchers found that consumers rated one type of tomato, the Matina, as being twice as sweet as the Yellow Jelly Bean tomato, even though the Matina contained less sugar than its yellow relative.
Researchers have long known that volatiles existed in fruits and vegetables, but they didn’t know how the different volatiles combined in the brain to create sweet flavor.

Flavor Reception
Flavor is a combination of input to the brain from the taste buds and from the nose. Aromas can enter the nose through the nostrils. They can also enter the nose through the back of the mouth when people chew food.
While studying tomatoes, Bartoshuk has found six volatiles that contribute to sweetness, independent of sugar.
Oddly, not all the volatiles responsible for sweetness smell so sweet on their own. In fact, one volatile called isovaleric acid smells like dirty socks, Bartoshuk pointed out. Yet it combines with the input from other volatiles, as well as input from the taste buds, to create the perception of sweetness in the brain.
Bartoshuk and her colleagues have recently discovered more than 30 volatiles that create sweetness in strawberries in addition to the six that work together to sweeten tomatoes.
No one knows exactly how volatiles create perceptions of sweetness in the brain.
“It’s possibly as simple as volatiles intensifying the effect of sugars in the brain,” said Bartoshuk in an interview with My Health News Daily.
Not all volatiles contribute to sweetness, either. In fact, Bartoshuk believes that some may actually suppress sweetness. Identifying those volatiles is equally important, because it may allow food growers to create tastier varieties of foods such as tomatoes, by selecting the genes

Iran Surpasses Turkey In Scientific Publications

The Scopus Citation has indexed over 4,450 articles, which rank Iran at 16th place in the world of science.
Jafar Mehrad, the head of Islamic World Science Citation Database, pointed to the latest state of scientific production in 2012 and said the US has registered 57,033 articles in this period, and ranks first, Mehr News Agency reported.
Mehrad added that China with 42,680 articles, UK with 16,947 articles, Germany with 14,897 articles and Japan with 11,831 articles ranked 2nd to 5th in the world, respectively. According to Mehrad, Turkey has produced only 3,664 articles in the same period.

Snap Exterior Window Shade

New Exterior Shade system blocks 90 percent of the sun’s heat without blocking the view.
According to IdeaConnection, these innovative sunscreens feature a new, patented fastener system that allows homeowners to quickly install their own ‘cut-to-size’ exterior window shades. The fasteners feature 3M’s peel & stick, VHB adhesive for amazing holding power in all climates.
The EZ Snap exterior shade system is a very effective and inexpensive way to cool your house, reducing air-conditioning needs by up to 60 percent. The EZ Snap mesh stops the sun’s heat on the outside of the window, not only cooling the home’s interior, but the window glass as well.
Installation is quick and easy, and the non-fray, EZ Snap shading mesh is an optical grade so that you can see right through it, without having you view blocked.
Installation requires simply cutting the mesh to size on site and fastening it in to place using the patented EZ Snap fasteners.
The EZ Snap fasteners also allow for the shades to be taken down for winter storage, by quickly unsnapping the shades from the window frame.

3Doodler Sketches With Extruded Plastic

WobbleWorks has developed a fun new way to express your artistic side--a pen that takes its inspiration from 3D printers.
The 3Doodler sketches with the same plastic filament used in most personal 3D printers, allowing you to draw in the air or on paper to create wire-like artwork, Kickstarter wrote.
The 3Doodler is 24 cm (9.4 inches) long and weighs 200 grams (7 ounces), or about the weight of an apple. It works by heating 3 mm ABS/PLA filament to 270 degrees Celsius (518 degrees Fahrenheit), so for safety reasons it’s not exactly something you want in the hands of young children.
Kids of ages 12 and up can trace stencils on paper (which can then be assembled into complete 3D objects like the Eiffel Tower), or just draw structures in the air.
The resulting doodles really are just that--doodles. With practice, though, you could probably make some pretty cool things with it. The quality of the pieces in the example photos may not exactly bowl you over, but WobbleWorks says the pen could be used to customize your smartphone or create jewelry, and is teaming up with some wire artists on Etsy to demonstrate its capabilities.
According to WobbleWorks, a 1 kg (2.2 pound) spool of 3 mm ABS at $30 to $50 will give about 110 meters (360-370 feet) of plastic. When extruded by the 3Doodler, that figure increases to more than 1,200 meters (4,000 feet).
Many different colors are available, but it’s probably much cheaper to just paint the plastic if you want multiple colors.
As of this writing, the company has more than doubled its $30,000 funding goal on Kickstarter, where a $75 pledge will secure a 3Doodler of your very own.

Scuddy Scooter Folds Two Ways

The Segway never actually changed the way cities are built--or anything else for that matter--but to a certain segment of commuter, a small, light, zero-emissions mode of transportation remains quite attractive.
The Scuddy is a German-built electric scooter that fits the bill. It folds up for easy transport, allows riders to sit or stand, and provides an attractive alternative to cars, bikes and motorcycles, Scuddy GmbH wrote.
Similar to the JAC and Myway, the Scuddy is a stand-up scooter that folds for transport. It doesn’t look quite as compact as those folding scooters, but it does add some convenience by offering two folding options.
It can fold up into a trolley, allowing the rider to pull it on its wheels (it even looks like you could stack a backpack, suitcase or package on top). This configuration is ideal for boarding a train or subway or rolling the scooter into the office for storage.
The scooter also compacts further into a small box-like package, ideal for loading it into tighter spaces like a car or closet.
Out on the road, the Scuddy makes use of a 2-horsepower motor to roll up to 25 miles (40 km) at speeds of up to 21.7 mph (35 km/h). Its rechargeable battery charges to full in about four hours with a standard charger and one hour with the optional quick charger.

Blood Thinners

Men with advanced prostate cancer might live longer when they are taking blood-thinning medication.