XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Monday 28 October 2013

Sex okay for burning calories, but not as good as jogging: study -

Sex okay for burning calories, but not as good as jogging: study - 



A small new study published last week claims that when it comes to burning calories, sex is better than a walk, but not as good as a jog.
Published online October 24 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the new study finds that a session of moderately vigorous lovemaking can burn 4.2 calories a minute for men and 3.1 calories a minute for women, at least when young, healthy people do it.
Researchers from Montreal's University of Quebec enlisted 21 heterosexual couples ages 18 to 35 for the study, and asked them to wear the fitness tracker SenseWear.

Each subject first completed a 30-minute jog on a treadmill to provide a baseline measure of their calorie expenditure.
Then they were sent home with the armbands and instructions to have sex while wearing the sensors.
Most sex sessions lasted around 25 minutes (with some as short as 10 minutes, others almost reaching an hour), with men expending more energy than women.
On average, men burned 101 calories when having sex, and women burned 69 calories. Still, that didn't beat the calorie burn when jogging: men burned 276 calories, or 9.2 per minute, while women burned 213 calories, or 7.1 per minute.
A separate study published earlier this year, however, offers a different conclusion, finding that sex only burns 21 calories on average.
David Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, tested the "sexercise" theory -- that sex can be exercise -- but found that sex lasted only six minutes on average, burning a paltry 20 or so calories. The findings were published in February in New England Journal of Medicine.


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Police firing GPS tracking 'bullets' at cars during chases -

Police firing GPS tracking 'bullets' at cars during chases - 



It's called Starchase. Essentially, it's a cannon that fires "bullets" that are sticky GPS devices.

CBS 12 offered an example in real life of how it's done.

Iowa state trooper Tim Sieleman seemed rather mesmerized. He told CBS 12: "If you had told me 16 years ago that I would have had a cannon on the front of my car, I wouldn't have believed it."



Officers in St. Petersburg, Fla., also are testing the system. As ABC News reports, the operation of the compressed air gun (not too unlike the sort that fires T-shirts into the crowd at NBA games) is quite simple.

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9/11 Suspects Can’t Mention being Tortured during Trial Testimony because Their Torture is Classified -

9/11 Suspects Can’t Mention being Tortured during Trial Testimony because Their Torture is Classified - 



In the Alice in Wonderland meets 1984 world of the U.S. concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, official state secrecy about matters already known the world over trumps the human rights of the prisoners still languishing there, according to lawyers trying to represent them despite the bizarre rules that hamper their efforts.

Take the issue of torture, which arose at a recent Guantánamo Bay hearing. It is an indisputable fact that the U.S. tortured detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, during interrogations between 2001 and 2006. Yet when defense attorney Jason Wright pointed out at a recent hearing that his client “was subjected to waterboarding for 183 sessions,” Judge James Pohl ruled him out of order for discussing classified information that can be uttered only behind closed doors.

Fellow defense attorney Cheryl Bormann complained that such rulings undermine the defense team, whose efforts keep coming up against “a brick wall because of the classification issue.”

“You can’t gag somebody about talking about torture and then want to kill them,” she argued.

Defense attorneys want to raise the issue of torture both because its practice is illegal under U.S. and international law and because it is believed by most experts to yield inherently unreliable information. At the hearing, the defense team said the secrecy of their clients’ detention and torture in secret CIA prisons “violated the U.N. Convention against Torture,” which the U.S. ratified in 1994, and prevented them from filing complaints with the U.N. under that treaty.

Because they are being prevented from even raising the issue in their clients’ defense, the defense team asked that the death penalty be ruled out as a possible sentence.

“You have the power to dismiss the death penalty or dismiss these charges because of the obstacles we face in this case,” argued Walter Ruiz, who represents detainee Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Although the Convention against Torture “gives certain rights” to the accused, “those rights do not exist, certainly not in front of this commission,” said Ruiz.

But prosecutor Clay Trivett argued that if detainees felt they were “mistreated in U.S. custody” they could file a complaint in federal court, and that should be sufficient.

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Bra sends tweet every time it is unclasped... -

Bra sends tweet every time it is unclasped... - 



A Greek marketing group has created the first "Tweeting Bra" as part of a campaign from Nestle Fitness for October's Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The social networking bra utilizes a special mechanism hidden under the hook of the bra. When it is unhooked, a signal is sent to a cell phone which in turn notifies a server that generates a tweet.  
A popular Greek TV presenter, Maria Bacodimou, will be wearing the tweeting bra for two weeks. Whenever her bra comes off, a tweet will be sent to her roughly 150 K followers reminding them to perform breast self-exams.  The Tweeting Bra also has it's own account on Twitter.
Unfortunately, the bra only sends Tweets in Greek at this time. 
But a girl can dream. 

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STUDY: Kids More Likely To Trust Attractive Adults... -

STUDY: Kids More Likely To Trust Attractive Adults... - 



Children tend to trust people with attractive faces more than unattractive ones, a new study has found.

32 preschool children were shown pictures of a novel object and two adult faces on either side.

The faces were taken from a pool of 48 photos that had been ranked from most attractive to least attractive by college students.

The scientists then asked the children who they would ask to correctly identify the object.

Researchers found the kids chose the attractive face over the unattractive one.

Then each face would “offer” a different name for the object.

Again the children were more likely to trust the answer of the more attractive person.

Girls had a greater preference for the attractive face than the boys, the study revealed.

“We see from the results that children and especially girls have more trust in attractive faces, even though there are no obvious reasons why people with more attractive faces would be more knowledgeable about object labels,” said study author Igor Bascandziev of Harvard University, quoted in the International Business Times.

The study suggests humans are born with an inherent bias towards more attractive people.

Other studies have shows children are more likely to trust someone from their own cultural and ethic backgrounds.

Bascandziev says it would be interesting to see more research along these lines.

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Scientists discover 'Lost World' of unknown creatures in Australia... -

Scientists discover 'Lost World' of unknown creatures in Australia... - 



Scientists have discovered a "Lost World" of unknown creatures in a rainforest perched on boulders in a remote part of Queensland

On the second day of a four-day trek to Cape Melville a team led by Dr Conrad Hoskin, from James Cook University, and Dr Tim Laman, from Harvard University, discovered a "bizarre" looking leaf-tailed gecko, a golden-coloured skink and a boulder-dwelling frog — species that have been isolated from their closest cousins for millions of years.
"We're talking about animals that are ancient — they would have been around in the rainforest of Gondwana... rainforest that's been there for all time," said Dr Hoskin.
Accessible only by helicopter, the upland plateau area is a 1.8 by 1.8 mile patch which sits on a "monstrous wall" of "millions of giant, piled up boulders the size of houses and cars". The whole mountain range is around nine miles long and three wide.
Having known of the range for more than a decade, Dr Hoskin's interest was reignited when the advent of Google Earth allowed him to view it from above. But nothing could prepare him for finally setting foot there and seeing an "incredible rainforest" with "good earth" and "clear, flowing streams".

"I was just walking around along the ridge line and there was this small lizard, a skink, that was something completely new," he said.
While its evolutionary relatives sneak around in leaf litter, this particular skink, golden in colour, hunts insects by jumping around on mossy boulder fields.
Later that day the team made their second discovery, "beautiful blotched frogs with orange in their legs", something Dr Hoskin had fleetingly seen previously but had been unable to identify.
Named the Blotched Boulder-frog, the small creature lives in cool and moist conditions deep under the boulder-field during the dry season, before emerging during the wet summer season to feed and breed in the rain. But it needs no pond — it can lay its eggs in the moist cracks of rocks, where tadpoles develop into fully formed froglets before hatching.
"And then, coming back by night, we saw an incredible leaf-tailed gecko."
It was the discovery of the trip. "This thing was mind-blowing, completely bizarre. It's really big, around eight inches with long spindly legs and huge eyes."

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