Saturday, January 30, 2010

The morning-after pill that works 5 days after sex

The tablet, called EllaOne, is more effective at protecting against pregnancy than existing drugs taken by thousands of women a year. Even when taken the full five days after unprotected sex, it still has a 50 percent success rate.

Health professionals are concerned that an improved morning-after pill will give women a false sense of security and encourage a relaxed attitude to sex. Critics claim this will encourage unprotected intercourse among young people, making them more vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases such as Chlamydia. Anti-abortion campaigners are also insisting that a five-day-after pill is very different to a conventional morning-after pill, and is in fact more like an ‘abortive agent’. Josephine Quintavalle , of the Pro-Life Alliance, said, “If you take a morning-after pill within 24 hours, there is always the argument that the sperm may not have fertilised the egg by then, meaning pregnancy has not yet happened. But if this pill works for five days there is no argument. This is not a contraceptive, it is an abortive agent.”

Researchers have since responded to this line of argument by insisting that EllaOne works by delaying the release of an egg for fertilisation rather than destroying an implanted embryo. At the moment, the drug is only available on prescription, but as more women use it and long-term side-effects become more available, it could soon be sold over the counter through pharmacies. courtesy marieclaire

Australia ‘most sinful nation in the world’

Australia is the most sinful nation on the Earth, a study has claimed as the country ranked first overall in seven deadly sins, which include lust, greed and pride. “The country that gave the world The Body, Sylvania Waters and Les Patterson has been ranked first overall in a study of the seven deadly sins - lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride,” according to Courier Mail. Australia took out the dubious honour in the edition of BBC’s magazine of science, technology and the future. While US topped the table for gluttony, South Korea topped the list for lust. Iceland ranked number one for both pride and sloth and Mexico topped the list for greed, the study revealed. Australia’s biggest weakness was envy and ranked in the top 10 in all categories to give a higher aggregate than the US, Canada, Finland or Britain. The article, which argues that people are ‘bad’ by nature, has found social data to compare nations under the categories of wrath, sloth, pride, lust, greed, gluttony and envy. The report said the to determine country’s wrongdoings, the researchers studied levels of violent crime by comparing incidents of assault, rape and murder per 1000 people. For sloth, they looked at the number of days off workers have. For pride the comparison was made on plastic surgery rates per capita, and for lust they looked at the amount people spent on porn.

We’ not ‘me’ couples resolve conflicts better

To reach the conclusion, UC Berkeley researchers analyzed conversations between 154 middle-aged and older couples about points of disagreement in their marriages and found that those who used pronouns such as ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’ behaved more positively toward one another and showed less physiological stress. In contrast, couples that emphasized their separateness by using pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘you’ were found to be less satisfied in their marriages. This was especially true for older couples. Their use of separateness pronouns was most strongly linked to unhappy marriages, according to the study. The study also found that older couples identified more as ‘we’ than did their middle-aged counterparts, suggesting that facing obstacles and overcoming challenges together over the long haul, including raising families, may give couples a greater sense of shared identity. The study has been published in the journal Psychology and Aging. “The use of ‘we’ language is a natural outgrowth of a sense of partnership, of being on the same team, and confidence in being able to face problems together,” said study co-author Benjamin Seider, a graduate student in psychology at UC Berkeley.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Canadian lawmaker slams ‘terrorist’ pie in the face

Throwing a pie in the face of Canada’s fisheries minister to protest the seal hunt should earn animal rights group PETA a “terrorist” label, a Canadian lawmaker said.

A seal hunt protester hit Fisheries Minister Gail Shea with a cream pie on Monday as she gave a speech in Burlington, Ontario. The animal rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, later claimed responsibility for the incident. Opposition lawmaker Gerry Byrne urged for an investigation into the incident that also takes into account Shea’s position as a top government official.

PETA officials dismissed Byrne’s comments as a “silly, chest-beating exercise”. “It is unlikely to impress anyone who has a heart for animals or who is bright enough to spot the difference between a bomb and a tofu cream pie,” PETA president Ingrid Newkirk said in a statement.

A 37-year-old New York City woman was taken into custody and charged with assault after the pie incident. Animal rights groups have waged an aggressive campaign in recent years to try to stop Canada’s 350-year-old commercial seal hunt, calling it barbaric. Ottawa maintains the survival of the species is not in danger and authorizes the slaughter of more than 300,000 seals annually along its Atlantic coast.

Villagers tunnel through mountain with hammers

A Chinese village spent five years hammering out a tunnel through a neighbouring mountain. For generations the only way to access Shiyan city from the Matigou village was on foot via a narrow cliff road. Each year there were several incidents of villagers falling off the cliff because of the bumpy and narrow road. “We had to dig out a tunnel for the village’s survival,” said Matigou village head Wen Changfa. “The direct distance was only 9 km, but it used to take at least half a day for villagers to reach the city in order to sell field produce and buy necessities,” said Wen. Most of the time Wen and other villagers would hammer at the mountain with the most primitive tools. “From time to time, when we had some money, we would buy a small amount of explosives to help us to proceed. The tunnel construction went ahead very slowly. Each day we could dig less than 1 metre forward,” said Wen. Although the tunnel is only 2 metres wide and 2 metres high, villagers are still happy that reaching the city now takes them only half an hour and is much safer. ananova

US teen pregnancy rate up for first time since 1990

The US teen pregnancy rate rose in 2006 for the first time in 16 years, an report showed, as experts speculated that the increase was due to abstinence-only sex education in schools.

Three percent more girls between the ages of 15 and 19 became pregnant in 2006 than in 2005, 4 percent more gave birth, and 1 percent more had abortions, the report by the Guttmacher Institute showed. Three-quarters of a million women younger than 20, or 7 percent of the 15-19 age group, became pregnant in 2006, the report said.

That made for 71.5 pregnancies for every 1,000, 15 to 19-year-old girls, compared to 69.5 pregnancies per 1,000 girls in the same age group in 2005, when the US teen pregnancy rate reached its lowest point in more than 30 years. The rise was “deeply troubling” and “coincides with an increase in rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programmes, which received major funding boosts under the Bush administration,” said Guttmacher Institute senior public policy associate Heather Boonstra. “This just shows once again that the investment that was put into abstinence-only programmes has not paid off,” Boonstra told AFP.

The rise in teen pregnancies follows a sharp decrease in the rate throughout the 1990s, which Boonstra said was largely due to better use of contraceptives by teens, and a leveling-off in the early 2000s. A smaller proportion of the fall in teen pregnancies in the 1990s was due to less sexual activity among US teens, she said. But in the early 2000s, contraceptive use among US teens decreased, and “certainly that is connected to this increase in teen pregnancy,” said Boonstra.

Chinese woman wants Jessica Alba surgery to win boyfriend back

A Chinese woman is so keen to win back her ex-boyfriend that she plans to undergo plastic surgery to transform herself into his favourite actress, Hollywood star Jessica Alba.

The 21-year-old, who identified herself as Xiaoqing, told the Shanghai Daily that she had met with doctors at a plastic surgery clinic in the eastern Chinese city who offered to do the work for free. “I have made my decision,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. Liu Qi, an official at the Shanghai Time Plastic Surgery Hospital, said the woman would need eyebrow lifting, eyelid reshaping and nose reconstruction to look like Alba, the star of ‘Sin City’ and ‘Fantastic Four’. “There’s no worry about the expense and it is technically practicable,” Liu was quoted as saying. “But the face-lift is irreversible and we hope that she would take it seriously.” Clinic officials confirmed the woman’s story, but would not say when or if the surgery would go ahead. The woman, who works for a web firm, described to the newspaper how her Alba-obsessed 28-year-old ex-boyfriend hung photos of the actress on his walls and stored her image on his mobile phone. The man demanded Xiaoqing do her make-up as Alba does, even when she slept, and gave her a blonde wig for Christmas, which he asked her to wear all the time. She told the newspaper they broke up last month when she threw her wig and fake eyelashes to the ground after passers-by laughed at her. But
afterwards, she said she reconsidered.

Dictionary banned from classrooms for defining explicit sex terms

A dictionary has been banned from classrooms in California after a parent complained it included a definition for oral sex.

School district officials sparked a row among parents by pulling the Merriam-Webster 10th edition dictionary from shelves in classes for nine and 10-year-olds and vowing to search for more provocative words. “It’s just not age-appropriate,” said Menifee Union School District spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature.” She said that other dictionary entries defining human anatomy would probably not be cause for alarm. The move has sharply divided the community in Southern California. Father-of-three Randy Freeman said it’s a “prestigious dictionary” but added that “I also imagine there are words in there of concern.” But the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported that other parents are furious about the ban and are demanding the dictionaries are returned. “Pretty soon the only dictionary in the school will be the Bert and Ernie Dictionary,” said Emanuel Chavez, a father-of-two.

Other books banned in the US schools last year included novels by Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison, Khaled Hosseini and Philip Pullman.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Have A Peaceful Day !!‏

If you want your Life to be magnificent story,
then begin by realizing that you are the author and
everyday you have the opportunity to write a new page.
Have A Peaceful Day!!!