Small World

A bottle of Chateau Neuf De Pape wine from the Rhone region in France may include constituents of up to 13 grape varietals. Time-zones away, olive oil experts at U.C. Davis work with 100 olive varietals to create cutting-edge olive oil. After all, like wine, olive oil can be made up of multiple varieties of its base fruit.
While olive oil consumption has steadily increased over the past 30 years due to its healthful properties and popularity among celebrity chefs like Rocco DiSpirito, in California producers make keeping up-to-date into an art form.

With respect to binge-drinking, “shot-gunning” a beer involves inserting a hole in the beer can and drinking it FAST. The game is so popular that a shotgun beer opener is even available to interested enthusiasts through the "liquorsnob" website. Similarly, too much of this kind of consumption may eventually lead to a hole in the heart.
Drinking more than one or two drinks per day for women and men, respectively, excessive drinking, as defined in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Dietary Guidelines, may cause a debilitating condition involving the heart known as “metabolic syndrome.”

If you're happy and you know it, you're probably a man.
Statistics revealed in the next edition of the Journal of Happiness Studies found that, on average, by the time men reach their 48th year of life their happiness exceeds that of women.
Century-long, nationally-based data on unfulfilled desires were analyzed by University of Cambridge expert Anke Plagnol and University of Southern California Economist Richard Easterlin.

According to research conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention one in three Americans age 65 and older fall. Recent findings by experts at the University of Tel Aviv, Israel, found that Ritalin improves cognitive impairments in seniors, which may greatly contribute to a decrease in falls.
The findings may be a step into the treatment of falls within the senior population, but Prof. Jeffrey M. Hausdorff, of Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University isn’t counting chickens before they hatch. “While the notion of treating fall risk with a pill is an intriguing concept it is not likely to be a silver bullet solution, and it is still too early to recommend Ritalin on a wide scale basis,” he said.
In 2005, the CDC analyzed 16,000 deaths in the elderly population in which unintentional falls were the fundamental cause of death making it among the top ten leading causes of death in senior citizens, a statistic that holds true today.

Puffer fish might kill, oysters are slimy and salmon skin is uncommon to eat, but around the word there are some even more unique drinks and delicacies that tests ones sensory analysis and may take customary valor to a new universe.
The scorpion drink—Is made by soaking a scorpion in vodka for three months after it has gone through a special detoxification process. Originated in China, sold in the U.K. supposedly improves libido, lowers toxins in the blood stream and lowers blood pressure.
Fried Spiders—The recent Cambodian craze involves frying Thai Zebra Tarantula’s as big as a hand in a mixture of MSG, sugar, salt and garlic. This spider dish began in the 1970’s after people had little to eat during the rule of Khmer Rouge.
Cobra blood—Though research on the effects of cobra blood is limited, it can be found in restaurants and bars in places like Indonesia. The potent delicatessen is consumed in a shot-glass amount and is reported to cause vivid dreams.

As Albert Einstein once said about balance, "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving." The same is true of bone mineral density in testing for breast cancer—balance is better.
The September 2008 issue of “CANCER” journal of the American Cancer Society published findings that higher bone density hints at higher frequency of breast cancer in premenopausal women, meaning normal or even lower bone mass points to a lower breast cancer rate.

In California it may be the summer of fires as smoke fills the air, but at Yale researchers pump smoke into the lungs of mice in order to help find an explanation behind reactions in smokers due viral infections.
Recent studies by researchers at Yale found that people who smoke have a worse reaction to viral infections not due to a weakened immune system, but because of an overreaction.

If the drinker paradox states that in any pub there is a customer such that, if he or she drinks, everybody in the pub drinks and the diamond-water paradox states that water is more useful than diamonds, yet is a lot cheaper , then the French paradox that the French suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease despite a diet relatively rich in saturated fats, must certainly be true.
The French paradox became popular on an episode of 60 minutes in 1991 with the incorporation of research supporting, red wine as the reason for the decrease in heart disease. Shortly after the show aired wine sales went up 44 percent.

On July 18, “Naked Nelson” was detained for stripping off his clothes and trying to open an emergency exit on a flight from Boston to Oklahoma City. Athletes from the New England Revolution, a Major League Soccer team, helped apprehend the man and detained him until officials arrived at the scene. Yet it is unclear what sort of mood “Naked Nelson” was in to drive him to such extremes.
Robert E. Thayer who is a professor of psychology at California State University Long Beach has written several books regarding moods. In his 1989 book "The biopsychology of mood and arousal" he defines a mood simply as a relatively long lasting, affective or emotional state. The state of mind of the nude man on the airplane therefore qualifies. Yet his mood, like an increasing number of other mental states, from attention deficit disorder to social anxiety disorder, would be classified as other than normal.
In a world in which such classified moods are often medicated, understanding factors that contribute to certain degrees of emotional states may be helpful in dictating a more positive mood. In the hunt for contributing factors that influence the mood food, sleep and exercise are among the most commonly referenced.

The ten male soccer spectators who were struck by lightning in the Boston area on Sunday had taken refuge under a tree when a storm hit and were a great example of a rare phenomenon.

Living on a desert island may not even be a mode of escape from Lyme disease because birds can also be a carrier of infected ticks. Dorothy Leland, who is an advocate with the California Lyme Disease Association and has a daughter with the disease used to love the outdoors a lot more. Since her daughter contracted Lyme over three years ago Leland has taken a different perspective on life in the great outdoors.
Ticks that carry the Lyme disease infection, which causes a rash that looks similar to Saturn rings, is a very complex disease to spot, prevent, and cure. Lyme disease associations like lymedisease.org that Leland is a part of aid in the education and prevention of Lyme. Leland says there are three main things one should remember when setting out for an expedition in nature: Be aware, choose spots carefully, and wear repellant.

Hypochondriacs beware. The Rocky Mountain spotted fever and lyme disease caused by ticks is nothing to take lightly—especially in the dry season when ticks are most prominent, even more so due to global warming.
Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which was first identified in the Rocky Mountains, is caused by the bacteria Rickettsia rickettsii, when an infected tick comes in contact with humans. The ticks affected by the bacteria include the American dog tick, the lone-star tick, and the wood tick, all of which like to live in wooded areas and tall, grassy fields.
Similarly, Lyme disease is named after the place it was discovered in Lyme, Connecticut in 1975. It is caused by a cork-screw like bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi. The black-legged ticks are usually the ones that spread the disease. Like its progressive corkscrew shaped bacterium, ticks are affected by feeding off small animals with the disease. These animals usually include mice, chipmunks, and other wild rodents. When the infected tick attaches to a person or animal and stays attached long enough (usually more than 36 hours) to take a “blood meal” it has further passed on the infection.