Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Do you think Megan Fox will stay single for long?

Megan Fox SingleStar of the sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Megan Fox has told reporters in the UK that she is in fact single. The 23-year-old actress called off her engagement with Brian Austin Green, and is now back on the market.

It seems the newly single Megan Fox already has a new crush; a guy named Rain, whom she describes as “The Korean Justin Timberlake.” What??

Anyway, Megan Fox has been busy promoting her new film Transformers 2, along with co-star Shia LeBeouf. Hey isn’t he single now as well?

Do you think Megan Fox will stay single for long? I don't think so. Meanwhile we leave you with one of her latest photo, you will find that she is 95% legs LoL!

Friday, June 12, 2009

Just Sleep to Solve Your Problem

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers.

They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM.

Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep - when most dreams occur - were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published the US work.

In the morning of the test day, 77 volunteers were given a series of creative problems to solve and were told to mull over the problem until the afternoon either by resting but staying awake or by taking a nap monitored by the scientists.

Compared with quiet rest and non-REM sleep, REM sleep increased the chances of success on the problem-solving task.

The study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.

The findings suggest it is not merely sleep itself, or the passage of time, that is important for the problem solving, but the quality of sleep.

Lead researcher Professor Sara Mednick said: "We found that, for creative problems you've already been working on, the passage of time is enough to find solutions.

"However for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity."

The researchers believe REM sleep allows the brain to form new nerve connections without the interference of other thought pathways that occur when we are awake or in non-dream-state sleep.

"We propose that REM sleep is important for assimilating new information into past experience to create a richer network of associations for future use," they told PNAS.

Dr Malcolm von Schantz of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey said: "Whatever the importance of the dreams themselves are, this paper confirms the importance of REM sleep, the sleep stage when most of our dreaming takes place."

Source @ BBC News

3 Lifestyle Habits That Can Boost Your Sex Drive

Boost Your Sex DriveAll the usual healthy habits are good for your sex drive—even if your low libido is caused by a condition such as diabetes or hypertension. Remember, sexual health and general good health are profoundly interconnected.

1. Get plenty of exercise
If you want to be "hot-blooded," then improve your circulation. Physical fitness can increase blood flow, which in theory can make sex more pleasurable since sexual arousal for both men and women involves increased blood flow to the genital area. And that can increase desire itself—if it feels great, you tend to want to do it more.

Exercise boosts endorphins, which lift your mood, and it can increase your energy. Not to mention that being toned makes some people feel sexier.

2. Eat a healthy diet
Arteries clogged with saturated fat don't bring as much blood to the genital area for arousal purposes. Hence the correlation between heart disease and erectile dysfunction.

But excess weight also messes with your hormones. "Obesity can shift the balance between estrogen and testosterone," says Michael Krychman, MD, executive director of the Southern California Center for Sexual Health and Survivorship Medicine in Newport Beach, Calif. And low testosterone can bring down your sex drive.

Nutrition counts too. For example, an iron deficiency can lead to fatigue, which in turn can lead to low libido. (Eat your broccoli!)

3. Manage your stress
"How about a simple vacation? How about communicating with your partner?" suggests Irwin Goldstein, MD, director of San Diego Sexual Medicine and editor in chief of The Journal of Sexual Medicine. "People are overworked and stressed, and they translate their overworked, stressed lives to a lousy sex life."

Source @ Health.com

Control Pain with Mind

control painScience is beginning to investigate and support the role of therapies such as biofeedback and meditation in pain control. The idea that the mind has power over the body may be especially useful to chronic pain patients who often find themselves without satisfactory medical treatments.

The emotional response to pain
Pain travels along two pathways from a source, such as an injury, back to your brain. One is the sensory pathway, which transmits the physical sensation. The other is the emotional pathway, which goes from the injury to the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex—areas of the brain that process emotion.

"You may not be aware of it, but you're having a negative emotional reaction to chronic pain as well as a physical reaction," says Natalia Morone, MD, assistant professor of general internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Mind-body treatments that involve meditation and relaxation probably affect these emotional pathways. However, Dr. Morone admits that many doctors don't put much stock in this theory. "Anything to do with mind-body medicine around pain is going to be controversial. This is all very new."

Research is beginning to show the connection
In a 2005 study, researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures activity in different areas of the brain, to see whether subjects could learn to control a brain region involved in pain and whether that could be a tool for altering their pain perception.

Laura Tibbitts, 34, an event planner from San Francisco who severely injured her arm, shoulder and back when she was thrown off of a horse, participated in the study. In describing her pain, she says: "My muscles and nerves feel like a bunch of snakes that are all intertwined, but then I also get a stabbing and shooting pain. So you have that horrible, achy, uncomfortableness, but then you get these jolts of pain."

In the study, Tibbitts was asked to increase her pain and as she did, an image of a flame on a computer monitor became stronger and more vibrant. Then she was told to decrease her pain, which caused the flame to die-down. "Sometimes I would imagine that the pain was literally being scooped out from me, taken away and carried off. Other times I used water imagery, like it was flowing through me and taking it away," says Tibbitts. After the test, she learned that she had been able to produce a 30% to 40% reduction in her overall pain.

Giving control to pain patients
For Sean Mackey, MD, director of the pain management division at Stanford University School of Medicine and one of the study's researchers, the research revealed a striking element of empowerment. "Patients would say, 'A-ha! For the first time I could see the pain in my brain, and I could control it. And that was a very powerful experience," he says.

Dr. Mackey believes pain medicine is moving away from the concept of strict mind-body separation toward a more unified—and ancient-sounding—view in which "mind and body are really one."

The bottom line for pain patients is that they may want to pursue pain-control techniques such as biofeedback, yoga, and meditation. But they also need to be on the alert for scams and beware of claims made by therapists seeking to exploit their desperation. Before turning to one of these therapies, it's best to thoroughly research the practitioner you choose.

Source @ Health.com