Wednesday 28 November 2012

10 Things You Could Do Before You Were Born



It takes about 38 weeks for a fertilized egg to develop into a full term baby. When does the learning process begin for an individual? Is it before or after birth? There is plenty of evidence today telling us that this process of learning begins even while we were still fetuses. Some of the behavior we picked up from the womb can even last a life time.
1) Movements: you probably made your first movements around 8 weeks into gestation although your mum may not have felt you moving until about 16-20 weeks of the pregnancy. Ultrasound technology enables us to clearly observe the fetus in the womb. Some of us even sucked our thumb as children but one thing we may not know is that we probably started doing this as a fetus because a fetus can suck his/her thumbs from 20 weeks.
2) Handedness: Common patterns of behavior seen in adults are also seen in the fetus – e.g. handedness. You chose your more active hand to use while you were still in the womb. It’s been observed that fetuses that suck their right thumb rather than their left thumb are likely to be right handed children.
3) Breathing: Well, you weren’t actually breathing while you were still a fetus but you learnt the process and technique of breathing then. A fetus does not actually breathe in the womb. The mother breathes for the fetus, and essential oxygen is passed to the fetus through the umbilical cord but around 9 weeks of pregnancy, a fetus begins to make breathing-like movements. This means that when the baby is born, he/she will be able to breathe straight away.
4) Eye Movements: Your eyes started moving around the 14th week of pregnancy and complex movements, similar to your eye movements now will have presented by the 24th week. In the last trimester of pregnancy, a fetus begins to have rapid eye movements.
5) Dreaming: the most reliable evidence that a person can dream is from a self-report and of course nobody could have asked you as a fetus if you could dream. So the issue of when an individual begins to dream is still a debate. However, fetus begins to have rapid eye movement (REM) sleep from as early as the 23 rd week of gestation. Typically, the REM sleep often indicates when a person is dreaming. Even though REM sleep has been detected in fetuses, scientists cannot know for certain if a fetus can dream because humans can still dream outside of the REM sleep stage.
6) Recognizing Sounds: As a newborn, it was possible for you to recognize music that you heard in the womb. The fetus begins to respond to sounds at about 20 weeks into the pregnancy. To begin with the fetus only hears low noises, but as development continues he/she starts to hear higher pitched noises too. Louder sounds can make the fetus startle and move about. The older fetus is able to discriminate between different voices and languages.
7) Urinating, Drinking and Tasting: You started emptying your bladder while still a fetus during the 10th week of pregnancy. Urine is passed straight into the amniotic fluid, the protective fluid surrounding the fetus in the womb. About five weeks later, the fetus starts to drink this same fluid. And as a fetus, you liked certain tastes more than others, and will drink more amniotic fluid if it tastes sweet.
8) Feeling Pain: Perhaps we may have wondered when it was exactly that we became aware of ourselves or started becoming conscious of signals coming from the outside world. We know with each other when someone feels pain because we can ask them and they can tell us. We cannot do this with the fetus, so we have to study when the brain develops enough to make this possible, and make an informed guess. If you touch the foot of a fetus at 12 weeks, he/she will move away, but it is extremely unlikely that the fetus is ‘feeling’ anything. This is just a reflex response like a knee jerk. From 26 weeks onwards it does seem likely that the fetus can hear sounds and feel pain too because the connection between the brain and the body which is a prerequisite for conscious experience will have been formed and functional.
9) Stress: At times we feel stressed or anxious maybe while playing a computer game or watching an action movie and this may even cause our hearts to beat faster. Such a response is also elicited by fetuses when the mother is stressed or anxious.
10) Yawning: Yawning is quite contagious and by reading this, you may even be triggered to yawn. But yawning even though contagious is something we begin to do before we are born. While some researchers have suggested that fetuses yawn, others have disagreed and claim it is simple mouth opening. But a new research has clearly distinguished 'yawning' from 'non-yawn mouth opening' based on the duration of mouth opening.

Friday 23 November 2012

Your Left Side is the Best Side When Posing for a Picture



Some of us run for cover whenever a camera is pointed at us. Are you one of those who dislike having your picture taken because you always seem to come out hideous? You may even feel jealous of your friend who always comes out flawless in photos.  Being photogenic comes naturally to some of us. Whether you come out good in a picture or not, there is something that can help you appear better. The next time you are posing for a picture, make sure your left cheek is facing the camera.

The reason for this suggestion is simple. Your left side is perceived as your best side. Your best side may be your left cheek, according to a study by Kelsey Blackburn and James Schirillo from Wake Forest University in the US. Their work shows that images of the left side of the face are perceived and rated as more pleasant than pictures of the right side of the face, possibly due to the fact that we present a greater intensity of emotion on the left side of our face.
Others can judge human emotions in large part from the expressions on our face. Our highly specialized facial muscles are capable of expressing many unique emotions. Research suggests that the left side of the face is more intense and active during emotional expression.

Blackburn and Schirillo investigated whether there are differences in the perception of the left and right sides of the face in real-life photographs of individuals.
The researchers explained that posers' left cheeks tend to exhibit a greater intensity of emotion, which observers find more aesthetically pleasing.

Participants were asked to rate the pleasantness of both sides of male and female faces on gray-scale photographs. The researchers presented both original photographs and mirror-reversed images, so that an original right-cheek image appeared to be a left-cheek image and vice versa.
They found a strong preference for left-sided portraits, regardless of whether the pictures were originally taken of the left side, or mirror-reversed. The left side of the face was rated as more aesthetically pleasing for both male and female posers.

These aesthetic preferences were also confirmed by measurements of pupil size, a reliable unconscious measurement of interest. Our pupils usually dilate in response to more interesting stimuli – here more pleasant-looking faces, and constrict when looking at unpleasant images. In the experiment, pupil size increased with pleasantness ratings.

Wednesday 21 November 2012

Cars Can Now Drive Themselves!



Imagine a situation where all you need to do is simply get into your car, lean back, with your hands off the steering wheel, and your feet off the pedals, you relax and just choose a destination. Your car, now in charge does the rest of the job of taking you to your destination without your supervision or control. And you could actually use the time just like commuters on public transport to do some work or maybe read a newspaper.
This was only possible in futuristic sci-fi films like the 2004 I, Robot where driverless cars were seen driving on highways, and many other older movies that featured autonomous cars. Well that idea no longer lives in the movies as driverless cars are fast becoming a reality. This is similar to some other sci-fi or fantasy concepts which later became scientific reality. In the 1997 American action thriller Face Off, we saw a full face transplant taking place, but it was not until 2005 that the first partial face transplant on a living human was carried out in France and the first full face transplant was completed in Spain in 2010.
Autonomous cars known as driverless or self-driving cars can fulfill the human transportation capabilities of traditional cars. The cars use a combination of technologies, including radar sensors on the front, video cameras aimed at the surrounding areas, various other sensors and artificial-intelligence software that helps steer. At the moment, self-driving cars look much like every other car already on the road, with a computer taking the place of the human brain. It is hoped that self-driving cars will be able to drive on public streets in the near future
There have been several programs around the world on driverless cars. The idea had initially faced legal hurdles but not anymore as politicians are now scrambling to make self-driving cars a reality. Three U.S states have now passed laws permitting driverless cars. California is the latest state to allow testing of self driving cars on the roads, though only with a human passenger along as a safety measure, the other two states being Nevada and Florida.
It is believed that the introduction of autonomous cars could produce several benefits. In a world where an estimated 1.2 million people die every year in road accidents due to human error, autonomous cars could reduce the number of traffic accidents on the road as self-driving cars will be safer than human-driven cars. This is due to the autonomous system’s increased reliability and decreased reaction time compared to human drivers.
There is also relief of vehicle occupants from driving and navigation chores. Then there is the issue of the occupant’s state. It could ferry around people who are unable to drive due to certain disabilities such as the blind, people who are too young and some others too old to drive. You won’t be needing driver’s license anymore. It would not also matter if the occupants were intoxicated. Cars can park far away where space is not scarce and return as needed to pick up passengers thereby alleviating parking space scarcity.
Google seems to be the most visible company working on these types of vehicles, but similar projects are under way at other organizations, including Caltech. So far, the Google driverless cars have racked up more than 300,000 driving miles, and 50,000 of those miles were without any intervention from the human drivers.
Of course there has been lots of concern coming from people about such cars. Many still believe that computers cannot be smart enough to maneuver the car in cases of emergency say when a cyclist or a child mistakenly runs into the road. Some also fear that the computer system can malfunction.
There is also the question of driver’s liability in case of an accident. What if a driverless car has an accident on the way? Who will be held responsible: the owner who by the way is not operating it or the manufacturer?
At a time when unemployment rate is on the increase globally, many fear that driverless cars will lead to the loss of a profession – driving.

Friday 16 November 2012

Benefits of Legalizing Marijuana


Two states in the US, Colorado and Washington recently passed a vote to legalize the recreational use of marijuana so that people there now have legal access to as much recreational marijuana as they can grow, sell or smoke.
The news has been greeted with criticism from so many. This could be because many of us see marijuana as nothing more than a weed – a dangerous weed that gets people high, inhibits their ability to think clearly, messes up with their psychomotor functions, and generally gets them to do the wrong things. Before now, marijuana had only been legalized in certain states for medical uses only, in treating certain ailments.

Health Benefits 

One of the advantages of medical marijuana is the fact that it can help manage pain felt by trauma patients, cancer patients and patients experiencing nerve damage. Marijuana has an active chemical component called tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, which can act as an analgesic that helps patients relax and deal with the pain.
Another benefit that scientists have found in medical marijuana is that it can help prevent the worsening of Alzheimer’s disease among the elderly. According to studies, THC in marijuana has the ability to arrest the formation of plaques in the brain.
HIV/AIDS patients as well as cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy also benefit from the use of medical marijuana. These patients are known to have difficulty in stimulating appetites and in throwing up what they eat. Studies have shown that marijuana helps them eat by inducing their appetite. The plant also helps them keep their food down.
Among brain cancer patients, it is revealed that THC in marijuana causes cancerous cells to undergo a process called autophagy. It means that the cancerous cells feed upon themselves and thus disappear, leaving healthy brain tissue alone.
These are just some of the many advantages that scientists claim medical marijuana to have. THC in marijuana has also shown positive development when it comes to treating asthma, glaucoma, lung cancer and breast cancer.
Research Benefits

One thing that is still lacking however is a long term study of the effects of the recreational use of marijuana. This is where the legalization will have a great impact. No country has ever completely legalized marijuana. Portugal has decriminalized it and other drugs, but not legalized them. In the Netherlands, possession of small amounts of cannabis is decriminalized but producing and selling the drug remains illegal. To understand the effect of cannabis on health, researchers need to measure individuals' exposures to the drug over time and relate that to their health problems. Doing such long-term studies in large groups of people is very difficult when use is illegal. It is difficult to convince people to reveal information needed for large-scale health studies, but under full legalization this will be possible.

Legalization should also give researchers insight into how cannabis affects psychological problems, including settling the debate on whether it causes psychosis. Another big question is its impact on alcohol and tobacco use. People who use marijuana are more likely to drink alcohol than non-users, but researchers are not sure whether the two forms of intoxication reinforce one another or substitute for one another. If they serve as substitute, then legalizing marijuana might be the best thing to do because it is believed that alcohol generates a lot more social harm.
Recreational use of marijuana is still illegal under US federal law, but if the states are left alone, the legalization could launch a living experiment into how people behave when drug laws are relaxed, and into the public-health implications as well as the effect on the drug cartels.

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