30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Risk of Childhood Kidnapping are Very Low
A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.209 In 2008 the nine-year-old son of the journalist Lenore Skenazy begged her to let him go home by himself on the New York subway. She agreed, and he made it home without incident. When she wrote about the vignette in a New York Sun column, she found herself at the center of a media frenzy in which she was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” (Sample headline: “Mom Lets 9-Year-Old Take Subway Home Alone: Co... 1 
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notes28 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Benefits of Exercise for Pregnancy
Does that mean exercise should be a part of human pregnancies? Evidence suggests the answer is yes. The first benefit is a practical one, having to do with labor. Many women report that giving birth is both the most exhilarating experience of their lives and the most painful. But women who exercise regularly have a much easier time giving birth than obese women. For fit women, the second stage of labor—that painful phase where you have to do a lot of pushing—lasts an average of 27 minutes. Ph... 1 notes
notesWomen who are fit have a shorter second stage labor compared to women who are obese, resulting in less stress and oxygen deprivation for the infant.
19 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Exercise During Pregnancy
There are two main reasons for concern about exercising during pregnancy. One is that it may reduce the baby's oxygen supply, since exercise, like other sources of stress, reduces blood flow to the uterus. Another risk is overheating. As we have already seen, fetal development is highly sensitive to temperature, and elevations of more than 2^0 C (or above 1020F) can increase the risk of miscarriage and affect the formation of the brain and eyes.
Despite these theoretical concerns, there is ...
1 There are some concerns about the mother exercising during pregnancy, but the benefits appear to outweight the potential deleterious effects and have no apparent effect on the child's IQ.
04 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Brain Differences Between the Genders
There are three reasons to expect evolution to have produced different mentalities in men and women. The first is that men and women are mammals, and all mammals show sexual differences in behavior. As Charles Darwin put it, "No one disputes that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild boar from the sow, the stallion from the mare."' The second is that men and women are apes, and in all apes there are great rewards for males that show aggression toward other males, for males th... 1 notes
notesSome dimorphism between the sexes as a result of evolution.
03 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Orgasms and Sperm Retention
t. Baker and Bellis discovered that the amount of sperm that is retained in a woman's vagina after sex varies according to whether she had an orgasm and when. It also depends on how long it was since she last had sex: The longer the period, the more sperm stays in, unless she has what the scientists call "a noncopulatory orgasm" in between.
So far none of this contained great surprises; these facts were unknown before Baker and Bellis did their work (which consisted of samples collected by ... 1 notes
notesWomen retain more sperm when they have an orgasm, but they are also more likely to be unfaithful when most fertile.
11 APR 2011 by ideonexus
We Exaggerate the Magnitude of Ice Ages
The history of Earth's climate is one of the more compelling arguments in favour of Gaia's existence. We know from the record of the sedimentary rocks that for the pst three and a half aeons the climate has never been, even for a short period, wholly unfavorable for life. Because of the unbroken record of life, we also know that the oceans can never have either frozen or boiled. Indeed, subtle evidence from the ratio of the different forms of oxygen atoms laid down in the rocks over the cours... 1 notes
notesIce Ages did not encroach on over 70 percent of the Earth's surface, meaning they were not as significant of an event as we tend to imagine them.
