Avoid Open-Office Plans or Promote Silence Hours
The recent article in The New York Times raised an issue of the noise at work in the office. The author noticed an obvious thing: the noise make people less productive and more distracted. He even bought up my favorite, evolutionary, standpoint: Mammalian hearing developed primarily as an animal-detector system — and it was crucial […]
Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate
I found this poster pretty convenient and informative, and unlike traditional USDA food pyramid, not misleading. Some people are concerned about the canola oil, and those concerns are eloquently listed by SleuthJournal. I may talk about these reasons later, but for now evidences found by multiple research centers, including the team of the South Dakota University, […]
Want to Be Happy? Do Not Rely on Self-Reliance!
Better life means, first of, all happier life, therefore happiness is the most important topic of this blog. Not going into great detail of what happiness is, let us start with the most important prerequisite of happiness: social relationships. All researchers looking into the topics, like this one, for example, found that successful social relationships […]
Love is Better Educator than Toys
The team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania released the results of a long-term study proving that warm parental nurturance by the age of four is a critical factor for child’s brain development. What exactly did “the parental nurturance” mean? It consisted of two components: warmth and affection (holding child close 10–15 min per day, conversation […]
Eat Less Red Meat
Red meat kills. In an impressive study covering 448,568 people, European researchers found a direct link between consuming red meat and premature death. They accounted for other factors, like age, lifestyle, smoking, etc., and the link still exists. The safe amount of red meat one can eat per day appears to be 20 gram. It is […]
Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?
Using cell phones has not been proven (yet?) to result in increase in the risk of cancer. A team of Swedish scientists recently published results of a case–control study on brain tumor cases of men and women aged 18–75 years and diagnosed during 2007–2009. In total 709 meningioma (the most common benign brain tumor accounting for about 30% […]
Users Manual: Stay Green and Neat
Bought a new kettle, washer, TV set, or camera? Congratulations! Got a stack of paper user manuals with it? User manuals are usually stored forever, sometimes even when the appliance is gone, but why storing papers? Most likely, you will never need it, or if you need, you may have a hard time finding it. […]