Air pollution kills 380,000 people each year in the world

A new study has determined that unseen and odorless, microscopic particles of air pollution wafting overseas and across continents kill some 380,000 people each year.
According to a report in Discovery News, Junfeng Liu of Princeton University and a team of researchers carried out the study.
Exhaust from diesel engines, sulfur from coal-fired power plants, and desert dust swirl into an insidious cocktail of tiny particles that can spend weeks airborne.
The most harmful are the smallest, less than 2.5 microns in diameter. When inhaled ,they can irritate the lungs or pass directly into the bloodstream and damage arteries.
Scientists and regulators know this is a major public health problem, especially in developing countries.
But less clear is the effect that air pollution generated in regions like China and Southeast Asia has on far-off lands, like, North America.
Particulate pollution born overseas that floats into Canada, Mexico and the United States accounts for 6,600 premature deaths each year, Liu and a team of researchers found.
Similarly, their study suggests that a dust plume from Africa and a fog of pollution from Europe converge on the Indian subcontinent, condemning nearly 200,000 people to early deaths.
Globally, the team estimates that some 380,000 people die prematurely as the result of particulates emigrating from foreign lands.
"It's clear that this is having an impact on health," said Denise Mauzerall of Princeton University, a co-author on the study.
"If we want to develop a strategy to deal with anthropogenic pollution, we should consider the health aspect as well as climate implications," she added.
Mauzerall said that regulating diesel exhaust would be particularly beneficial.
Diesel engines emit both black carbon, which absorbs sunlight and warms the atmosphere and microparticles. (ANI)

Dogs 'as smart as 2-year-olds'

Dogs' mental abilities are close to a human child age 2 to 2.5 years, according to a new research.

Psychologist and leading canine researcher Stanley Coren, PhD, of the University of British Columbia has reviewed numerous studies to conclude that dogs have the ability to solve complex problems and are more like humans and other higher primates than previously thought.

Coren said that the intelligence of various types of dogs does differ and the dog's breed determines some of these differences.

"There are three types of dog intelligence: instinctive (what the dog is bred to do), adaptive (how well the dog learns from its environment to solve problems) and working and obedience (the equivalent of 'school learning')," he said.

Data from 208 dog obedience judges from the United States and Canada showed the differences in working and obedience intelligence of dog breeds, according to Coren.

"Border collies are number one; poodles are second, followed by German shepherds. Fourth on the list is golden retrievers; fifth, dobermans; sixth, Shetland sheepdogs; and finally, Labrador retrievers," said Coren.

As for language, the average dog can learn 165 words, including signals, and the "super dogs" (those in the top 20 percent of dog intelligence) can learn 250 words, Coren says.

"The upper limit of dogs' ability to learn language is partly based on a study of a border collie named Rico who showed knowledge of 200 spoken words and demonstrated 'fast-track learning,' which scientists believed to be found only in humans and language learning apes," Coren said.

Coren found that dogs could also count up to four or five. And they have a basic understanding of arithmetic and will notice errors in simple computations.

Other studies he examined looked at how dogs solve spatial problems by modelling human or other dogs' behaviour using a barrier type problem.

Coren said that through observation, dogs can learn the location of valued items (treats), better routes in the environment (the fastest way to a favourite chair), how to operate mechanisms (such as latches and simple machines) and the meaning of words and symbolic concepts (sometimes by simply listening to people speak and watching their actions).

Coren said that during play, dogs are capable of deliberately trying to deceive other dogs and people in order to get rewards.

"And they are nearly as successful in deceiving humans as humans are in deceiving dogs," he said.

The study has been presented at the American Psychological Association's 117th Annual Convention. (ANI)

Amazon River estimated to be 11mn years old

n a new research, scientists at the University of Liverpool, UK, have discovered that the Amazon River is 11 million years old.

They discovered that the Amazon River, and its transcontinental drainage, is around 11 million years old and took its present shape about 2.4 million years ago.

As part of the research, University of Liverpool researchers, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil, analyzed sedimentary material taken from two boreholes near the mouth of the river to calculate the age of the Amazon river and the Amazon deep sea fan.

Prior to this study, the exact age of the Amazon, one of the two largest rivers in the world, was not known.

Until recently, the Amazon Fan, a submarine sediment column around 10km thick, had proven difficult to penetrate.

New exploration efforts by Petrobas, however, have lea to two new boreholes being drilled near the mouth of the Amazon - one 2.5miles (4.5km) below sea level - which resulted in new sedimentological and paleontological analysis of samples from the river sediment.

“River sediment records provide a unique insight into the palaeoclimate and geography of the hinterland,” said Jorge Figueiredo from the University’s Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

“This new research has large implications for our understanding of South American paleogeography and the evolution of aquatic organisms in Amazonia and on the Atlantic coast,” he added.

“The origin of the Amazon River is a defining moment: a new ecosystem came into being at the same time as the uplifting Andes formed a geographic divide,” he explained.

Top 10 Ways to Improve Your Memory

­­The human brai­n is like a library that stock­s memories instead of books. In some ways, that makes the hippocampus, the part of the brain most involved in memory, the brain's librarian. The hippocampus has the most responsibility in this cranial library, juggling the new releases of short-term memory while cataloging materials for the permanent collection of long-term memory. It's not the only part at work, however, in storing these chapters of our lives. Different kinds of memory are stored in different areas of the brain. With such a large system, the brain needs a system of encoding and retrieving memories, something a bit more complex than the local library's Dewey Decimal System.
The brain has to be able to pull information at the drop of a hat, whether it's a fact on hold (such as a telephone number) or a dusty memory that's been sitting in storage for years (the memory of your first kiss). No one likes a library that loses books or shelves them in the wrong place. Yet sometimes we find ourselves with a very poor librarian on our hands, one that doesn't allow us to retrieve memories when we need them. Sometimes it's trivial, like when we tear apart our homes looking for glasses perched innocuously atop our heads, and sometimes these lapses in memories are more embarrassing, such as when we call a colleague "sport" because we simply can't remember his name.
Whether you're a college student studying for an important test or an aging baby boomer concerned about forgetting a recent doctor's appointment, there are a few things everyone can do to optimize the storage and checkouts in our private libraries of memories. Alert the librarian and head to the next page for the first tip.

How Did a 15 Years Old Girl Generate Thousand of Dollars From A Website?

What do you think about that story? For some of you, that paragraphs I quote from anguilla-beaches.com may be not so interesting. But when I finish my story, I can sure that the only think you want to do is to visit the site!
Why? Because that site was built by a 15 years old girl, and successfully generated thousand of dollars. How awesome!
This inspiring story began in August 2002, when Nori and her father, Ken Evoy, made a trip to the beautiful Carribean island of Anguilla. It was actually their second trip there.Nori liked the place very much, and all of her adventures there brought her an idea of building a web site.
I took the whole story she shared, so you won’t miss anything.
Who Would Have Thought That A Vacation Could Pay My Way Through University?
by Nori Evoy
nori evoy - anguilla-beaches.comIn August, 2002, we made our second trip to the beautiful Caribbean island of Anguilla. Many people had never heard of it. My Dad hadn’t.
And then he read a book.
It is an inspiring story about two people selling everything they owned, “slowing down” and opening up their dream… a restaurant in Anguilla.
Their love of the island, through successes and mishaps, their description of the island and its people, caught my dad’s fancy. This book is really about a journey down a “road less traveled.”
It’s really about people choosing to lead their own lives.
I feel so sad for people who are stuck working for people they don’t like, for those who are forced to go to work, fight traffic, be in an office and then come home at the end of the day.
My dad works hard building SiteSell.com and Site Build It!. Probably too hard. But he loves what he does — I can see his dream, how Site Build It! can free people from a hum-drum life. You don’t have to do what the Blanchard’s did and risk every penny and open your own restaurant.
You can do what I did. But never meant to. :-) (After all, who could have imagined that A Trip to the Beach and Site Build It! would turn me into a successful Web site owner, too?)
Anyway, all that to say… when my Dad asked me to write my “case study,” how could I say “no”? (How could I say “no” anyway — but that’s a different story!).
Before I start my story, I should add one thing… I get some e-mail saying how lucky I am to have my Dad tutor me on “Net marketing.” Well, he doesn’t.
He does help me a lot with my writing — he loves to write, and he pushes me to “say it better, Nori — make it come alive.” And he did help me get started with the software. But I do all the rest myself.

India to have law to regulate test tube baby centres

India will soon have a law to regulate the mushrooming test tube baby centres run by private medical practitioners, health minister Anbumani Ramadoss said in New Delhi on Thursday.
Test tube baby centre, medically known as in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) centres, help infertile couples to conceive and have a baby.
The private IVF centres are growing like anything. They are unregulated and some of them are illegal as well. Soon, we will bring a law to regulate them," Ramadoss said.
He was speaking at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) after inaugurating the first government-run IVF centre there.
"The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has already submitted a set of guidelines and we are going to frame it and move it to the cabinet. It would be a comprehensive law," the minister added.
He said nearly eight per cent of couples in India suffer from infertility and need assisted reproductive techniques to conceive.
Major reasons for infertility in males are decreased sperm counts and abnormal sperms, and for females it is the blocked fallopian tubes, inability to ovulate and abnormalities in the genital tract are the reasons behind infertility.